#2 The Fire or The Fall

04.15.2021 - By The Wheeler Centre Play

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Warning: This episode of Better Off Dead contains references to suicide and self-harm. These include discussions about how some terminally ill people have tried to end their lives in the absence of voluntary assisted dying laws. We are aware of the Mindframe guidelines on appropriate language around the discussion of suicide and self-harm, and we have endeavoured to limit this detail.

If you are likely to be distressed by this material, we recommend that you proceed with caution. Please have a self-care plan in place and let others know that you may be upset. Please see a list of services at the bottom of this episode page.

The images from 9/11 of people jumping from the World Trade Centre to escape the searing heat of the buildings melting beneath them haunt us still.

Accepting that the only choice facing these people was a choice of how they would die – death by fire, or falling into oblivion – NYC’s Chief Medical Examiner, Charles Hirsh, chose to classify their deaths, not as suicides, but as homicides.

In the Victorian parliamentary debate, MPs opposed to voluntary assisted dying repeatedly described it as ‘state sanctioned suicide’. But is offering a dying person a choice about how they die the same as suicide?

Perhaps the most persuasive voice that convinced MPs to legalise assisted dying was that of coroner John Olle. The lonely and brutal suicides he described to a parliamentary inquiry – of elderly and terminally ill Victorians beyond the help of palliative care, rational people supported by loving families – sent a shock wave through the parliament.

In this episode we meet Lisa, whose mum Margaret was a fiercely independent 82-year-old woman dying of a rare degenerative neurological disease. The race to meet the strict eligibility requirements of the VAD law, before she lost the ability to communicate her wish to be helped to die, meant that for Margaret each waking day was filled with fear.

Faced with the prospect of her illness moving faster than the law, and that she will not be able to leap free, will Margaret have no choice but to be taken by the fire?

Lisa Hogg and her mother Margaret “Mum was always a person who did things on her terms.” - Photos: supplied

“For the months preceding Mum initiating the VAD process, Mum would say things like, ‘I’ve worked out how to do it’. My sister would ask, ‘Do what?’ and she would say that she had worked out how she was going to kill herself. The methods included throwing herself out of bed onto the hard floor and cutting herself with scissors or a knife.”

Lisa Hogg, Margaret’s daughter