Over the past two weeks, I’ve started watching SVT documentaries about death. My interest in death actually began more than ten years ago. Perhaps it first became clear when my grandmother, who lived to be 103, died in 2015. Before that, of course, I had been in contact with death, not least through my father’s passing in 2012. But as I increasingly came into contact with my own awareness, I realised that contemplating “death” is important for understanding life.
This may sound morbid, but I find it fascinating. I have the deepest respect for each person’s individual experience of death, especially when people close to us and family members disappear from our lives. I have no wish to persuade anyone to change their own view of death or their experiences of it. These are simply my personal observations and reflections.
The first documentary was 6 dagar kvar att leva (Six Days Left to Live), in which TV journalist Carina Bergfeldt travels to Texas and meets a death-row inmate. She also tries to understand all sides: the perpetrator, the perpetrator’s relatives, the victims, the victims’ relatives, prison staff, townspeople, and several people involved in the execution itself, which is scheduled to take place six days after the story begins.
The second was På tirsdag skal jeg dø (On Tuesday I’m Going to Die), about Preben, who is paralysed from the neck down following a serious workplace accident. He no longer feels that what he has is a life, and wants to end it through assisted suicide at a clinic in Belgium. The series also follows Preben’s immediate family, including his wife Brit and his foster son.
The two series have in common that both men know—or consider it likely—that they will die within just a few days.
It is clear that knowing death is approaching does something to people. I have also seen this in my own relatives.
People who are soon to die tend to become honest; there is no time for bullshit anymore. You can see it in Ramirez’s candour, and in the unguarded, loving relationship between Preben and Brit.
The ego is in checkmate and can no longer try to control things. (Not that it can ever control anything; it is mostly an illusion that we, as egos, believe we control anything at all.) Because of this, Ramirez is the only one who sees clearly: he is not in the position of a victim, even though his body is to be “sacrificed”. He understands that the victims’ relatives are utterly paralysed by grief, and that this is a consequence of his own actions. He understands that reality is the way it is, and that Texas will take his life. That is not something he argues with. This is exactly what Byron Katie means by loving life as it is. That is why Ramirez is so evidently open: he shows no self-pity, yet feels empathy. This is difficult for the ego to understand, and it is easy to jump to the conclusion that he is somehow “playing the good guy”. But I don’t think he is.
Preben fully realises that his decision is primarily for his own sake, that it is selfish, which is not quite the same as being “egoistic”. One can debate whether it is ethical, according to any particular school of thought, to leave one’s family in this way. Perhaps Preben does not see living fully in the present as an alternative. But there is another lesson here: reality is the way it is, and it is up to each person to do what is possible in the moment. Apparently, physician-assisted suicide was possible, because that was the reality in the story. Whether it is ethical or not is another matter, one that reality does not concern itself with.