This novel is a contemplation of control. Can we manage the end of life in a way to avoid the loss of the qualities that make life worth living?
Generally, people don’t love getting old. We all know that we have to die. Maybe it would be better if we could stay youthful and just drop dead at some point. Maybe it’s that getting very very old and miserable in physical and emotional health issues might just eventually make it easier to become detached from life. That might help us to personally stop holding on and for others to be less sad to see us go. There is often pain and “care” at both ends, being born and dying, coming in and leaving this existence. The physical pain of the mother is followed by a decade or more of necessary care for the child who cannot be as independent as adults can feel. There is pain, work, and ordeal involved with that mixed in with the joy and deepening attachment. Then a few decades later, if we are lucky to make it that far, there is pain and care necessary again as a person loses that cherished independence in old age.
In the story of this novel, a couple, he, a doctor working in the NHS (UK National Health Service) and she, a nurse, have throughout their careers seen more than enough of the miseries that can beset the elderly. They make an agreement in 1991 in their 50s to end their lives at age 80. The wife, Kay, has just gone through a decade or so of care for her father. It has been terrible. He lived in an unfortunate diapered dementia, accusing his family of being strange invaders into his home. He became a difficult person to manage and care for. He didn’t know his wife or his children. He pines for a lost love from 50 year ago, before his marriage and family. After years of this the memory of what he was is all but gone and the family has mixed emotions when this monstrosity who was once a loved dear one is finally dead. They can’t help feeling relieved and can at last rest in peace themselves. They are over the grieving loss of him. That happened while he was physically still here, but already somehow gone.
So after this family disaster Kay is primed for Cyril’s unusual suggestion, and after all it is 30 years off.
Flash forward to 2020 and time to take the Seconal that Cyril has stowed away for years in the fridge. Lionel Shriver plays with various outcomes. A couple of them are futuristic science fiction. In one a drug is invented that stops and reverses aging. In another they choose cryonics with unexpected results.
Sometimes they have good outcomes, others miserable.
In one Kay sends a text to her daughter that alerts her to what they intend. The authorities, the cops, are called and the couple is put in an institution for the mentally ill. It is a miserable, prison-like place that they cannot escape.
The reading of this novel was prompted by an interview with Shriver on The Writer’s Voice Podcast. She talks about experiencing the decline of her father and that she is approaching an age where aging and death become eminent realities rather than a younger person who might experience these things as more remote than likely. We all know we are going to die, but in youth it is a far off non-reality that with aging becomes much more real and just around some corner. Where a 35 year old imagined easily living into their 90s the 65 year old might not feel committed to that. Lionel Shriver is 64 years old.
These factors prompted her contemplation which led to the novel. The main energy of the story is dependent on two related factors. Neither of which is fear of actual death. Death is always an unknown abstraction. There is fear of decline, being in continuous pain and confusion. In relation to the decline, the fear of losing control, independence; having to be dependent.
Maintenance of control, or taking control of their destiny is what has motivated the couple’s suicide pact. They are not depressed. They have a comfortable home and good lives. They fear the harsh and long decline that they have witnessed in their medical careers and are making a gamble to avoid that. They want quality, not particularly quantity. They are also aware that it is not so easy and quick to die. People who are middle-class have access to a medical system that can keep people alive long after their autonomous lively years. In fact we have to prepare legal documents to get the medical industry to STOP, to not resuscitate after certain events so to not be kept alive in a state that appears like living death. The couple knows that there might be no window of opportunity to get out quickly if they wait too long and a health disaster has already hit.
It could be that at 64 Lionel Shriver is still too young to know what life means to an 80 year old and too youthful and ambitious to understand changes that can occur in the elderly. Perhaps that need to control is let go of along with other youthful ambitions. Rather than being concerned with becoming a burden, some elderly might drop such concerns and just be willing to let others worry about what to do with them as long as they can remain alive. Maybe this even goes on unconsciously.
Given the high possibility of eventual dependence, can we assume that humans look at this fear and view it from the perspective of past experience? Perhaps a person’s willingness to accept dependence is based on a prior long experience with it; childhood. Therefore a memory of an unhappy childhood dependent on adults who didn’t understand, or even abusive, is transferred to the fear of returning to dependence in a situation commonly referred to as “Second Childhood” and simply not want to go there. . .AGAIN.
The economic situation of the couple in the book is good. They own their nice comfortable home, will have reasonable pensions, and the NHS to handle the medical so they don’t really fear old age poverty. Ending up old and poor could be a factor in the interest in leaving when one can no longer work and make a “living”. This novel is not about the class war. It has the feel of a work by and for the educated white upper middle class and their fellow travelers
In one of the scenarios that Shriver invents they are planning on the 80 and out so go through their wealth on vacations all over the world. But backing out at 80 puts them in an unnecessary financial bind in the years to come.
Writing this report in Sept 2021, the novel has a hot off the press up-to-the-minute feel since it deals some with the March 2020 COVID lockdowns which unfortunately we are still involved with.
The novel doesn’t deal with the most emotional social issue of suicide. What happens to the survivors? The couple have three grown children. One son is concerned about his inheritance. One alerts the authorities when she finds out beforehand what is about to occur. The meaning of suicide to survivors is big issue the novel avoids. After all, the dead are gone and the concerns of the survivors are all that matters after that. Maybe Shriver assumed that since they are 80 year old suicides no one would much care, “Oh they were old anyway.” “Lived a full life.”
In a social structure that doesn’t want to see death as a part of life there is a conspiracy of individual life and its preservation being all that matters. Unless the life is that of another human that suggests a threat to our life. Then they have to be eliminated at all costs even if there is considerable collateral damage that might even be ourselves. Is a major cause of war and conflict the fear of death?
There is a repetition of a particular speech of Kay’s as she gets to her 80th in each of the scenarios. She is contemplating leaving a life she never understood. She says she never knew what it was all about and what one should actually DO. Age is not bringing any wisdom other than knowing one does not know meaning and is not going to ever find out.
Methods are not looked at in the novel. The doctor has access to the Seconal. Is an overdose a non-violent death? It is not as messy and horrifying to discover like a self inflicted gunshot. It does not bring the innocent into it as stepping into a path of a train which horrifies an operator who is just doing a job.
Is The Bartleby Method of simply, “I prefer not to.”, the more socially responsible? That would be stopping life by not consuming life, self starvation. Other life is what gives us life. We all live off one another. We only live because of consuming other life, plants and other animals. (And they all are equally precious and have their own type on consciousness.)
Is “I prefer not to!” the most moral way to go? Enough, and moving away from the table?
Should We Stay or Should We Go is a good novel of ideas and some melodramatic outcomes.
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