School of Social and Political Science

Description

How does asking others to help you die, to help you commit suicide, bend the limits of our relationships and perhaps of care itself? This paper will trace the “negative imaginaries” (Berthod et al. 2019) that make assisted dying thinkable in the UK. Through a series of portraits—ethnographic stories from my fieldwork that highlight the requests for assistance and companionship that I witnessed—I describe what the “assist” in assisted suicide looks and feels like. The portraits begin with a deathbed scene which describes the haptics exchanged between a mother, Iona, her daughter, Jennifer, and the volunteers in Switzerland. Starting with this scene, I consider the role of expertise, intimacy, and touch in this setting. This talk therefore explores two types of care: one which I called “anesthetic care” and the other which is intimate and affect laden. It begins to sketch out an ethics of accompaniment which is relational and spontaneous, often revolving around actions which are at once meaningful and meaningless. It asks, echoing the voice of those I worked with, if love is a more accurate affective economy through which to describe the actions taking place between the dying person and those of us who are left behind.