NEXT, PLEASE!
My favourite reflection: “I am writing this today. Tomorrow will be different because of what I do not know today. But if I waited to know everything, I would never write it down.”
- Arno stern
Definitely — I told myself — what we are reading influences us in a singular way! Suddenly, and thanks to memory, we find ourselves joining ideas that always seemed isolated to us, thus solving some internal enigmas.
I was reading about death, not because I was planning a spectacular suicide that would make me famous, or because I was plotting the perfect crime — so perfect that I didn’t even know myself — or because my unconscious manifested a desire to die or a morbid attraction by the death. I was reading about death because I wanted to write about Euthanasia.
The definition of the term (“the art of procuring a comfortable death”) was the only thing I read on the subject after having approached the considerations that many have made about death. Suddenly, a futuristic film I saw when I was twelve years old came to my mind. The film raised the possibility that when each human being died, they could relive pleasant feelings through a film or a piece of music.
I always imagined — and even now that image persists within me — an immense, comfortable room, decorated in great taste with dim light, an armchair, some chairs — and in the background a movie screen.
Faced with such an image, my question was and continues to be, will science manage to overcome physical pain so we can all choose the sensory experiences of our last hours of life? In which case, what would be the demands of the human being — taking into account that each person, each inhabitant of the Earth, is unique?
I imagine new, sophisticated and eccentric ways of dying peacefully will be introduced. But — placing ourselves in this position, how many of us would go alone and how many would be accompanied? How many would decide to die suffering, while being able to die full of joy? And the unknown that remains spinning in my head: how we would feel as we queue to enter — if this possibility exists one day — when they tell us, Next, please!
