February 1, 2016
Readers Respond in their Thousands to “The Big Sleep” & the Reality of Ageing
When my article about Peter and Pat Shaw, the husband and wife who took their own lives, went up on Fairfax websites at noon last Friday, I didn’t know what to expect.
Would our readers click on a story about an elderly couple’s suicide pact? Or was it too much for a sunny afternoon at the end of the week?
Within an hour of publishing “The Big Sleep” online hundreds of people were reading the story; an encouraging start, if not out of the ordinary.
But by the next morning, by the time the story had then appeared in print, something had changed.
On my personal Facebook page, people of all ages were sharing the article, urging friends and family to read it. Then the emails, phone calls and text messages started.
Parents of children I’d gone to school with; cousins; colleagues; CEOs, politicians; doctors; people I had not seen for years. They all felt a compulsion to talk about it. They clearly felt that Peter and Pat Shaw, who had decided to end their lives before their bodies and minds deteriorated further, had done well to avoid that suffering.
One old friend wrote to say that her father had flagged his intention to take his own life one day in the future and that she felt deeply conflicted about it. The Shaws’ story had made it easier for her family to discuss it.
Doctors and social workers who work in aged care emailed to say that they were saddened by the lack of choice around death in Australia. One emergency doctor said she had cared for elderly people who wanted to die while their families demanded “everything” be done to keep them alive. “Sometimes they scream they want to die, or that they don’t want me to touch them,” she said. “I then have to decide how far I need to go with treating the patient.”
We estimate the story has now been read by nearly a million Australians. Thousands have made the effort to comment on the Facebook posts about the story, many sharing their own, often harrowing, experiences of seeing loved ones die in difficult circumstances.
“My father died a horrible death in an aged care house,” wrote Trianta Karalis. “My mother is slowly going mad from dementia.” Rhonda Purcell wrote of her mother’s “living nightmare” with dementia in a nursing home. Cushla Wise recalled her mother’s “long, slow, undignified death with Parkinson’s and Lewy body disease”.
Gillian McAlpine shared that her mother “spent the last six years of her life in a long-term hospital setting, confused and lonely”. Michael Finn told of his parents’ last months, and wondered “if this would have been different if they’d had the option (of suicide)”.
Donna Close told us: “I don’t want to see my parents suffer. I want to remember them as bright buttons who filled our hearts with love.”
There were hundreds more in a similar vein.
Not everybody agreed that the Shaws’ story should have been told. One person on Facebook accused The Age of glamorising suicide; another tweeted that it would encourage people to take their own lives.
One man with a history of depression wrote to say it was irresponsible journalism and that people would certainly die as a result. “Knowing how suicidal people think, I can guarantee your articles have and will lead to people in this frame of mind… taking their own lives,” he wrote.
We were mindful of this before the story was published. In an effort to minimise the risk for vulnerable people, we decided not to detail the methods that Peter and Pat used. We also included help lines for people to call if they were troubled by the story.
Keryn Curtis, a journalist who writes about ageing, noted that “dignified”, “respect” and “choice” were words that recur in the comments about the article. “As an observer of this topic over the last decade or so, it feels to me as though the tide is really on the turn,” she wrote on the website, Frank & Earnest.
“What seems to have changed is not so much the number of people who would like the choice of an assisted death (although that may be changing too) but a couple of other things: one, an increased willingness to speak out publicly in great numbers; and two, an emerging willingness on the part of those who would never personally make that choice, to accept the right of others in certain circumstances to have that choice.”
The Shaws’ story resonated for a reason. It highlighted an uncomfortable truth; that many Australians value their quality of life and do not want to live beyond a certain point that might be intolerable to them. Their voices are getting louder.