Then comes assisted suicide. What an expression. Things have gotten so bad that you can’t do anything without an assistant, you can’t even die.
And in this hopeless situation, a service appears. If you are in a position to order and pay for such a service yourself, you’re in luck. If not, you’ve just created a whole lot of worry and expense for your nearest and dearest. The question is how they, in paying for your murder, can avoid feeling like murderers. Indeed, human civilization has advanced quite a bit when you now have to justify a murder. Don’t ever underestimate civilization in that respect. It’ll always think up a nice word for it. Eu-than-a-sia. It sounds like an ancient Greek goddess. The goddess of a good, beautiful death. I imagine her with a slender syringe in her hand instead of a scepter. “Euthanasia is a death caused for the benefit of the person whose death is being caused.” Now, there’s the awkwardness of language, which must justify the act and so it spasms, twists, biting its own tail in the end. I’m killing you for your own good, you’ll see (how could you not?) that it’ll be better for you and the pain will be gone.
I assume that in this country the practice has been going strong since World War Two. Euthanasia suits it. Illegal at first, then semi-legal. Everyone closed their eyes to it, like so many other times, and gave the private clinics an opportunity to welcome people from Europe who were headed toward death. From one part of Europe, to be precise. For those from the other part, my part, this, too, was denied to us. We didn’t even have anesthesia, never mind euthanasia. Death under communism was no indulgent affair in silk sheets. Besides, nobody would have given you a passport and visa to leave the country with a one-way ticket, without a guarantee that you would return. You go, die, and automatically become a defector, for which you are sentenced to death. In absentia and posthumously.
Switzerland as euthanasialand. If you’re looking for a good destination for dying, we can help you. The funny thing is that this death business has not officially entered the guidebooks, the tourist handbooks. All guidebooks are created with the illusion that a person is alive and traveling. This is a given. Death does not exist in the world’s guidebooks. What an omission!
And when the time draws near for a person to set off? When he is already a traveler in the other sense of the word? Why are we still waiting for guidebooks for such travelers? Or perhaps they already exist, who knows?
Sterbetourismus. I’m almost positive that the word was first thought up in Switzerland. The data indicates around a thousand foreigners per year, mainly Germans, but quite a few Brits as well. And not only the terminally ill. Elderly couples who have decided in advance to leave together, if one of them is terminally ill. I can imagine how they arrive, mild-mannered and slightly awkward, holding hands. And just like that, holding hands, they go through the whole procedure. They don’t want to lose each other somewhere in those boundless Elysian fields. It’s not like they can arrange a time and place to meet up.
The cost. What is the cost, after all? I dig through the sites. Around seven thousand francs for the prep work. With a burial and all the formalities—ten thousand francs. Surely if you hire a killer it would be more expensive, and far less comfortable, to boot.
Perhaps couples get some kind of discount. But then again, seven thousand francs isn’t much for a country like this. So that means they make their money off turnover. When you think how everything has gotten more expensive . . . Clearly the price of life has fallen, while everything else has gone up. Even though death could never really keep its prices high throughout human history, while in the twentieth century it was outrageously cheap. Yes, indeed, they surely count on a high turnover.
On the other hand, how much could it really cost, fifteen grams of pentobarbital powder? You can get it in Mexico from any vet if you tell them you’re going to euthanize your elderly dog.
I carefully study the website of one of these organizations, supposedly a nonprofit. The site is quite simple, in green. I have never imagined green as the color of death. The slogan up on top is To live with dignity, to die with dignity, and seems more fitting for an order of samurai, which I guess makes some sense. A simple photo of the whole team, which inspires a quiet horror—all of them smiling widely, nice white teeth and open arms. How big was the team? Twelve, like the apostles. I wonder if that was deliberate, I doubt it. In 2005, however, one of them turned out to be Judas and leaked insider information, calling the organization a “well-paid death machine.”
There are no reviews, just as there are no money-back guarantees.
This process is absolutely risk-free and painless, this is what the medical brochure they give me says. But isn’t it life-threatening? What are they trying to say, goddamn it, that you won’t get stomach issues, constipation, blood pressure crashes, or risk addiction?
There is also a discount during the summer months. Clearly people prefer to die primarily in the winter. I wonder whether these discounts cause more people to decide to go for it. For your swan song, there’s really no reason to be a cheapskate, you can allow yourself a certain luxury. I assume that the brokers and discreet managers of death (surely they must exist, disguised as tourist agencies) take advantage of this. A long black limousine, to have room for the stretcher if you are bedridden, which whisks you off along the highways of Europe. If the patient so desires and is in a suitable condition, we stop for the evening in Austria, then spend the afternoon at the Zurich Lake. On the way back the limousine transforms into a hearse and takes the urns straight back, with no stopovers on the return trip.
Sterbetourismus is for people of means, the poor don’t use euthanasia.
After the whole slaughter of the Second World War and the death industry in the camps, it is much more difficult for Europe to permit the business of offering good death. Thus neutrality by necessity turns Switzerland into a delicate monopolist. As Gaustine would say, whatever you grab in Europe today, it’ll always lead you back to World War Two. Nothing was the same after 1939.
I went to see the building where they carry out the ritual or procedure, and it was completely unremarkable. It looked more like a big two-story shed with plastic siding on the exterior. The décor inside was humble as well, judging from the photos on the website. A bed, a nightstand, a painting on the wall, and two chairs. Some of the windows look out toward the lake.
I tried to read everything coldly and technically, so I wouldn’t think about the main thing. Funny, but the whole time I was imagining myself, and not my father. The technology was clear, but still, how do you deal with the feeling of guilt? My father, seeming to sense this, delicately helped me. Just as parents subtly sacrifice themselves for their children their whole lives. He passed away on his own. I was with him in his final hours. I held his hand and I wondered what he would like to sense once again with his last cells of memory if he could. I lit up a Stewardess cigarette from our ’70s stockroom with Eastern supplies. My father was the most beautiful smoker I ever knew. I tried to imitate him when I secretly lit my first cigarettes. I now took a drag off the Stewardess in his place, and noticed how his nostrils twitched slightly and his eyelids registered the change. Then he went quiet.