“The very people who are now chanting 'compassion' may very well find themselves at the receiving end of a lethal injection in the not too distant future.”
O'Brien cited the words of the late British Catholic convert and social critic Malcolm Muggeridge, who reflected during the 1970s that “the delay in creating public pressure for euthanasia has been due to the fact that it was one of the [Nazi] war crimes cited at Nuremberg.”
In his NPR interview, Pratchett spoke of his ideal death scenarios, giving a poignant and superficially appealing portrait of the “death with dignity” that suicide advocates claim as a right.
“You know, with your grandchildren around you, a bit of sobbing,” he imagined. “And you say goodbye to your loved ones, making certain that one of them has been left behind to look after the shop.”
Pratchett also spoke about a real suicide he witnessed in Switzerland, while working on a BBC documentary. “This gentleman, being a very English gentleman, thanks everybody who was there for coming. And he drunk of the drink, and very shortly after he died.”
But O'Brien insisted that it was never right for friends and family to become accomplices to this taking of life, just as it could never be right for individuals – of any religion, or none – to treat their own lives as a disease.
He emphasized that friends and family, out of love for the terminally ill, must never give spoken or silent consent to suicide.
“I feel sympathy for (Pratchett's) sufferings,” O'Brien reflected. “If he were a family member, friend, neighbor, or acquaintance I would do all in my power to ease his sufferings, but I would not take it upon myself to destroy him or to cooperate in his self-destruction.”
“To be a suicide advocate in any way is to be a participant in murder. Not to act in defense of life, is to act (in complicity). There are no innocent bystanders when the unjust taking of human life occurs.”
In many of Pratchett's own comedic novels, “Death” appears personified as a recurring and sympathetic character – fond of cats and Indian food, tending to his routine of ushering characters out of the imagined universe of “Discworld.”
O'Brien, who is currently preparing a novel with fantasy elements, said all fiction writers have a duty “to maintain what J.R.R. Tolkien called 'the moral order of the universe'” in their imaginary worlds, no less than in their own lives. In that moral order, the intentional taking of innocent life is always wrong – and the patient endurance of suffering is a test of heroic virtue.
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“To die with authentic dignity is a true heroism,” O'Brien said, noting that it can also “evoke another kind of heroism from those who are suffering with a dying person through the dying process.”
While Pratchett and others present the question of suicide purely as one of individual rights, O'Brien believes the real question is one that confronts the whole of humanity: Are all people worthy of love and care, or are some lives disposable?
“In essence, that is the choice before mankind at this stage of history,” the Catholic author stated. “Will we become people of authentic love, or will we become a race of murderous sentimentalists?”