Dying Well

M*A*S*H vs The Princess Bride

The game of life is hard to play
I'm gonna lose it anyway
The losing card I'll someday lay
So this is all I have to say

Suicide is painless
It brings on many changes
And I can take or leave it
If I please

(from Suicide is Painless by (or "Song from M*A*S*H") by Johnny Mandel (music) and Michael Altman (lyrics) 1970)

The idea that suicide is painless is beguiling and, ironically, dead wrong.

But the song that preaches this message is soothing, haunting and enchanting. It’s like being put to sleep. Many of us have heard the tune over and over against, being the theme tune of one of the greatest sitcoms of all time, M*A*S*H.

For those under the age of 45, let me explain what a huge phenomenon M*A*S*H was. It ran on CBS from 1972 until 1983 and is set on a Mobile Army Surgical Hospital (hence ‘MASH’) in the Korean War.

Already we’re into the illusions and allusions. The show was being made and broadcast during the Vietnam War and the audience were invited to draw pretty straight lines between the two. M*A*S*H ran for eleven years, the sitcom lasted significantly longer than the Korean War, which lasted for about three.

The sitcom itself was brilliant. The characters were memorable, well-drawn and recognisable without being cliches. The script fizzed along, with Hawkeye (Alan Alda) being like a modern-day Groucho Marx in a mad Catch 22-style world. M*A*S*H was a firm favourite in my house, growing up. BBC2 broadcast the show over 15 years, from 1973 until 1988. Here in the UK, we watched the show without the laugh track that American audiences would have heard. It just felt smart, funny and poignant, without just being mawkish, although it certainly drifted that way in later seasons.

They clearly did something right, as the final episode is one of the great events in TV history, running at 2 ¼ hours, and being viewed by 120 milllion Americans. (Back in 1983, the population of the USA was around 230 million.) That’s a lot of people humming along to the immediately identifiable theme tune ‘Suicide is Painless’. And that amount of humming has an effect.

Making Capital

Never ones to miss out on opportunity to make a buck, the TV controllers immediately ordered a spin off, one involving a much-loved character nicked-named ‘Radar’. His character’s actual name was Walter, and a pilot of W*A*L*T*E*R was commissioned and broadcast.

And here we go full circle and come to the point. Read the synopsis of W*A*L*T*E*R and you will see that Radar, having gotten married, was abandoned on his honeymoon. Hitting rock bottom, he goes to a drugstore in order to buy enough drugs to commit suicide. Thankfully he’s talked out of it and applies for a job with the local police. A series was not commissioned. M*A*S*H had finally died, arguably of natural causes.

Sorry, Where’s the Circle?

The reason I say this is full circle is because we see another attempted suicide right at the beginning of the M*A*S*H story, in a movie based on a novel by Richard Hooker called MASH: A Novel About Three Army Doctors. The song was written for a scene in which an army dentist Walter "Painless Pole" Waldowski wishes to take his own life, partly through feelings of shame about same-sex attraction. A strange Last Supper-style suicide scene is staged in which he is given a black pill to swallow.

But it’s a sleeping pill. Painless wakes up the next morning. And he’s fine. And this attempted non-suicide is never spoken of again. Suicide really is painless if it’s only a sleeping pill. And not suicide. But that bit’s not in the song. There’s no extra verse explaining that the painlessness of suicide itself is an illusion.

So let us note this: if politics is downstream from culture, M*A*S*H was a tsunami of culture that will devastate any politics in its path. And so now people really do think that suicide is painless. It isn’t. And this includes assisted suicide, also known as ‘assisted dying’. And there is a political rear-guard action trying to prevent assisted suicide, under the banner of Dying Well. I attended a Fringe Session on this at the last General Synod. It was a real eye-opener.

The Myth of Painlessness

It is rather assumed that modern medicine – that thing that has striven to preserve life for centuries – has found a fool-proof way of ending life without pain. I learned that this is not the case. In fact, look at places which have introduced Assisted Suicide and you will find people being invited to drink an unregulated cocktail of drugs which often takes hours to work. It is not painless. It is agony.

In fact, one of the arguments against the death penalty (often opposed by those in favour of assisted dying) is that there is no humane way to kill someone. Stories are told of lethal injections taking hours and hours to take effect, and not always working. What’s the difference?

Doctor, Doctor

The best known brand for this sort of thing is Dignitas. It is not a medical institution. Doctors are not involved. Why not? One reason is that when you press into the research and surveys, you discover that the majority of doctors don’t want to kill people. This includes those who are theoretically in favour of assisted dying. It reminds me of a version of the Woody Allen line, “I'm not afraid of death. I just don't wanna be there when it happens.”

It's also interesting to note that the doctors most opposed to assisted suicide are those working in palliative care, tending to the sick and the dying, witnessing the pain first-hand.

None of the above seeks to minimise pain. Quite the reverse. Pain is real, and vile – and everywhere. As Westley says in the Princess Bride, “Life is pain, highness. Anyone who tells you differently is selling something.”

Those in favour of assisted suicide are not selling something for financial gain. But they are pedalling a myth that suicide is painless. And it isn’t. The more you look into this issue, the more complex it gets. And it’s simply not true to say that the pain can be eradicated before Christ returns and swallows up all pain, sickness, sadness and death.

So whenever I hear the word, ‘assisted’ in relation to suicide or dying, think of Westley’s friend, Inigo Montoya: “You keep using that term. I don’t think it means what you think it means.”

Find out more about Dying Well here.

Oh, and here’s a new trailer for my Water into Wine show. If you want to book it for your church, get in touch here.