The dying decision: choice, coercion and community

A Japanese drama about medical assistance in dying, Plan 75, reveals a lot about our relationlessness.

Sian Brookes

Sian Brookes is studying for a Doctorate at Aberdeen University. Her research focuses on developing a theological understanding of old age. She studied English and Theology at Cambridge University.

In a retirement home, a older person sings karaoke while the person behind waves a hand.

Chieko Baishô plays Michi.

Happinet.

“Being able to choose when my life will end provided me with peace of mind. With no feelings of doubt. She led a good life on her terms, people will say”.

In Chie Hayakawa’s 2023 dystopian drama Plan 75, these are the words of a silver-haired, wrinkled woman in a promotional video for the eponymous plan – a government scheme which offers all over 75-year-olds the option of a pain-free death at the time of their choosing.

And yet for Michi, an older lady toying with the decisions around Plan 75 it doesn’t really feel like it is her choice which matters at all. Whether it is the $1,000 grant offered as an incentive to die, the luxury amenities on offer at the Plan 75 facility promoted in leaflets and magazines, or the young person employed to gently guide the candidates towards their death (but whose real job it is to make sure they follow through with it), this is a world which has a clear agenda – to rid society of older people. Indeed, it is clear that this is a vision of a world which believes it is better for old people to die than to put financial burdens on the economy or their families, and this is a culture willing to subtly coerce individuals to accept and act on that belief.

Plan 75 reveals an interesting point at the heart of the MAID (Medical Assistance in Dying) debate. One of the primary reasons that MAID is so attractive is the ability to take back control of one’s life and death, yet what happens when that seeming control isn’t really within the individual’s own control at all? For Plan 75, what is marketed as giving control back to older people, is really just a twist on a more sinister political policy to pressure individuals to sacrifice their “burdensome” lives for the greater good. Of course, this is a common argument for rejection of assisted suicide. This is the dangerous ‘slippery slope’, where MAID begins as an option only for those who desperately need it to relieve intense physical suffering. Yet it quickly becomes a tool to remove people whose lives no longer seem worth living due to societal expectations and opinions, rather than any objective reality.

Do we ever truly choose to die totally independent of the expectations of those around us?

For many, this problem can be appeased through strict legal controls over MAID – as long as the powers that be are regulated, MAID is still OK. As long as it is the individual who maintains control over their own death (and not the state), the goal of personal autonomy is maintained and all is well. And yet this perspective fails to ask the question - is such control over our own death ever actually possible? Do we ever truly choose to die totally independent of the expectations of those around us? In a world which places so little value on old age, can older people really make choices unaffected by that (deeply flawed and inhumane) logic? And, indeed - the elephant in the room – no matter how much we try to control death, in the end is it not death that ultimately controls us? As fundamentally finite beings we can never escape it completely – it will always find us one way or another. Ultimately, we will all have to face the reality of death when it comes to us. Complete control and autonomy are never truly possible.

In light of this unveiling, the possibility that complete choice and autonomy around death isn’t really an attainable goal, what better options might we pursue?

Where previously we would find comfort and hope in being loved, known and held by others in our death, now all too often this isn’t the case.

One thing is clear in Plan 75, the isolation and loneliness of older people in a society that has rejected them is deeply problematic. The movie primarily follows the stories of Michi, who lives alone with no family and Yukio Okabe, an older man totally estranged from his remaining family. Both face life, and are facing death, alone. We live in a world where increasingly we are forced to face death alone. When our final days and hours rarely happen in the family home, surrounded by our loved ones, but in faceless institutions devoid of lifelong meaningful relationship the sense that we are no longer doing death together as a society is acute. Where previously we would find comfort and hope in being loved, known and held by others in our death, now all too often this isn’t the case.

At the same time, there is no doubt that our modern world is unceasingly committed to the ideal of individual personal agency and autonomy – “She led a good life on her terms”. As a myriad of philosophers and theologians have commented, belief in human autonomy has come to replace belief in God. And MAID is one area which reveals this to be the case most acutely. Where previously we would turn to God to find comfort in the face of our finitude, instead now we turn to ourselves – the last hope we find in the face of death is our individual ability to control it.

Death and health should be a corporate phenomenon – when one person is ill, all of society is ill.

The German theologian Eberhard Jüngel described death in this broken world as “the occurrence of complete relationlessness”. In fact, Jüngel suggests that as human beings we are first and foremost made up of our relationships – we are truly human not by how we self-define in isolation but how we relate – how we relate to the God who made us, and how we relate to other people. This need for relationship is found most acutely in the face of death. As Ashley Moyse points out in his book, Resourcing Hope for Ageing & Dying in a Broken World, death and health should be a corporate phenomenon – when one person is ill, all of society is ill. And so, as death increasingly becomes the journey of the individual – when we face death in isolation from others and in isolation from God no wonder we feel such a strong desire towards control, towards ending our lives prematurely, towards science to help us avoid any more pain than we can bear alone.

In Plan 75 we see glimmers of hope in the possibility of relationship. As Michi and Yukio find rare moments of human connection with a long-lost nephew, with a young person working for Plan 75, with another older person going through the same questions around mortality you can’t help but feel deeply uncomfortable with their choice to apply for the scheme. It is in the hints of love, physical touch, smiles exchanged, even a simple conversation shared between two people that suddenly MAID seems so disconnected with the hope that life still has to offer through relationship. Perhaps if we could imagine a world where death became no longer an occurrence of complete relationlessness, but a locus for relational dependence, for familial connection, for leaning on God and not ourselves, the need for MAID would feel a little less necessary. It would be a world with a little more hope.

Review

Culture

Film & TV

Romance

13 May 2023

6 min read

What’s love got to do with it?

Watching Lovesick, a surprisingly profound comedy about chlamydia, prompts Beatrice Scudeler to consider permanence in relationships.

Beatrice Scudeler

Beatrice writes on literature, religion, the arts, and the family. Her published work can be found here.

A row of young people stand and talk to each other

Lovesick's cast.

Netflix.

This article contains spoilers for those who have not seen Lovesick.

I was working on my English MA in 2019, just before the start of the pandemic, when a friend first told me about a Netflix show that had just aired its final season, Lovesick. The premise, I will grant, was not the most inspiring one for an unmarried, socially conservative graduate student whose only experience of dating had been an unfortunate three-day courtship with her at-the-time best male university friend.

In Lovesick, Dylan Witter is the usual twenty-something-year-old: out of university, sort of purposeless, dating a string of women he thinks he’s deeply in love with, but breaking up with each of them no later than at the four-month mark. Unsurprisingly, he is diagnosed with chlamydia; shaken by the realisation that eleven years of sex out of marriage has left him with little more than sadness and a disease, he decides to meet with all of his ex-girlfriends, both to warn them that he may have given them chlamydia, but most importantly to try and figure out why he can’t find permanence in his relationships.

From this point, Lovesick spends three seasons going back and forth between Dylan’s past and his present, building towards the final confrontation, at the end of season three, with his best friend Evie, with whom, he eventually realises, he has been in love for seven years. Along the way, we meet Dylan and Evie’s other best friend, Luke, who proposed to his girlfriend while still at university, was rejected, and now lives a sexually reckless lifestyle, as well as Angus, the kind-of-forgotten friend, who married a woman he didn’t really love, had sex with a maths student turned one-time stripper, divorced his wife Helen, and is now having a child with ex-stripper Holly.

By the time we are out of university or school, it is unsurprising that our sense of certainty and purpose should crumble, when suddenly the burden of finding meaning is solely on our shoulders.

Based on this description alone, you’d be forgiven if you thought this show quite a depressing drama, and certainly not one worth your time. In fact, it is a surprisingly profound, honest comedy about our generation’s struggle with the false promise of freedom, and our deep-seated desire for permanence, for a more sacramental view of reality. Dylan’s trials in his youth all point him towards the realisation that making commitments (whether that’s sticking to a career and becoming actually good at your job or finding permanence in a romantic relationship) is ultimately the one thing that makes life worth living. The writers of Lovesick would perhaps not put it this way, but this truly is a show about people who desperately need God, and fail without His guidance.

The same applies to all of us, to those who are not Christians, but also to those of us who profess Christianity, but live as though we are atomised and self-sufficient (which we can all be tempted to do). When we are children, we have our parents to guide us; they are not a replacement for God, but they provide some guidance. Later, at school and university, it’s our teachers. By the time we are out of university or school, it is unsurprising that our sense of certainty and purpose should crumble, when suddenly the burden of finding meaning is solely on our shoulders.

If we go to church, if we have a community in Christ to support us, the burden is somewhat lifted. But Dylan, Evie, Luke, and Angus have no such thing. They rely on each other alone, and, since they are lost, all they can do is commiserate each other about how difficult adult life is.

Even so, the suggestion is there in Lovesick that there are moral standards external to our conscience, that there is something sacred and greater than us. In the very first episode of the show, Angus begins his ill-fated marriage to Helen. They get married in what is presumably an Anglican church, and Dylan makes a curious remark that, even though he’s ‘not religious’, a wedding in a church seems more appropriate. He laughs it off by suggesting that you have to sit somewhere hard and cold to really enjoy the ceremony, but it’s clear that he’s talking about more than this.

What he’s experiencing is an intuition which I would guess is still in so many of us even in our post-Christian society, that is, the intuition that there is something sacred about promising to love and care for another person for the rest of your life, that it’s not merely a contract. It is a duty to uphold such a promise, and this is a kind of promise that ties us in love to what some people may call ‘the universe’, though what we really mean, who we really mean, is Christ.

They have chosen to make an attempt at permanence, not to dismiss adult life as a senseless heap of broken people.

Sure enough, the rest of the show is about our protagonists watching all their significant relationships fall apart, and trying to rebuild them. I will have to spoil the ending for you, but that does not really matter, as it’s fairly obvious which direction the show is building towards from the very first episode. Angus is left alone as Holly leaves him, but vows to find a new job in order to provide for his unborn child. Luke stops engaging in promiscuous behaviour (sort of, he has seven years of trauma to deal with, after all) and begins a precarious, but genuinely caring relationship. After being hurt and hurting many people, Dylan and Evie decide that, in spite of all the heartbreak, and after a broken engagement, it is still valuable to make ourselves vulnerable to suffering for the sake of loving another person.

The show ends with Dylan telling Evie that he loves her for the first time, and you can tell it’s the first time in his life that he has really meant it. They are not married yet, but we can guess that’s what will happen next. They have chosen to make an attempt at permanence, not to dismiss adult life as a senseless heap of broken people, but rather to decide to take away some of the brokenness by growing up, making a commitment, and standing firm.

To marry during a pandemic, in the wake of my parents’ divorce, and uncertain about our future, was at once the maddest, and the best decision we ever made.

Something I have not yet told you is that the first time I watched this show was when I first started dating my husband. Although I could not relate to the endless dating, I could relate to the fear, the uncertainty of whether the other person wants to care for you in the way we want to care for them.

Not long after, I told my now husband that, if he didn’t think our relationship would lead to marriage, I’d much rather we break up and move on. I did not want Dylan and Evie’s seven years of suffering. I wanted marriage, I wanted commitment, I wanted a family. We did get married, around a year later, and after a year of marriage I watched Lovesick again. Now as a married woman, and having gone through the hardships of moving country twice, having a child after a difficult delivery, and facing problems in our extended family, I appreciated more deeply what a sacred and courageous thing it is to commit to sticking by one person, no matter what.

To marry and have children, knowing how ruthless and un-beauteous the world can be, is exactly the act of bravery our society so desperately needs. I watched Lovesick for the third time just recently, leading up to our second wedding anniversary. It was my husband’s first time watching, and we could not help but reminisce about our courtship, and how, to marry during a pandemic, in the wake of my parents’ divorce, and uncertain about our future, was at once the maddest, and the best decision we ever made

So, yes, watch Lovesick, even though it’s technically just a comedy about chlamydia. It may spur you to reflect on the real meaning of love: the fearless and unconditional caring for the other, regardless of their brokenness, but rather because of it. After all, that is how God loves us.