The 'All is Beauty' ad for the Canadian clothing retailer Simons portrays Jennyfer Hatch, a BC woman who chose assisted suicide. She is walking on a beautiful beach. She is, it seems at least, surrounded by family and friends. They spend day and night talking, singing around bonfires, playing with glowing Chinese-lantern-type glowing animals in the deep night. This, it seems, is how Hatch has chosen to spend her remaining days..We're left jealous. We wonder why we don't have a community like that, that really appreciates beauty and the good things in life, like hanging out for days on the beach without a care in the world. It looks like paradise..Then we remember it's an ad. (Who is stuck with feeding these people? Who pays? Do any of them have to work?) It's pretend. It's framed. It's selling a dream that doesn't exist..But the cold pretence, the doublethink, the twisting of reality behind the ad is alive and well — for how we now face suffering and death in Canada does indeed require a rejection of reality..And its coined in the diabolical phrase “there are options.”.Left in hospitals and long-term care homes, distanced from family and grand-kids, many feel like they have nothing left to live for. No meaningful connection with their families. No one comes to see them. "Why would I want to live?” they say. “There is nothing for me.".Or, racked with mental anguish, they are nothing-burdens in a new world of efficiency, power, and production where suffering — their daily experience — has no meaning, and is in fact anathema..The care providers who should have hope and life in their hands come quietly into that supposedly safe room and, in soft clinical tones remind them of “the options.”.No, not all is beauty..What about this man? In his 69th year he finds out he has stage three cancer. He and his wife have struggled financially for many years. They have mortgage insurance that would kick in and cover their 150-thousand-plus mortgage were he to die before the age of 70. As he heads into the hospital three months before his birthday, he faces a long road of potential treatments. The weeks drag on and he slowly deteriorates, but he is determined to keep fighting. He dies one month after his birthday, and the bank now won't pay a penny of insurance..If only he'd stopped fighting?.Not all is beauty..An eighty-two year-old woman goes into the hospital for tests on a lump that seems to be growing. She is told that she has Hodgkins. After more tests and a week of quickly deteriorating health, she goes into the hospital once more where with her daughter by her side, she is informed that she will be admitted. And while the woman starts to face the fact that the Hodgkins has moved from stage 2 to stage 4, just while she is trying to make sense of her life and the hard path ahead, she is informed “There are options, you know.”.Not all is beauty..Or a middle-aged man is lying in hospital with yet another autoimmune virus that has taken hold of his middle-aged body. Tomorrow, if his lungs don't respond after they are drained of fluid, they will need to intubate him. The doctor, in hushed tones, asks his wife if she wants them to go ahead, or...well, “there are options”. In another meeting later that day, the same doctor asks the man if he wants to be intubated. Again, with the not-so-subtle subtext: There are other options..They'd said it would be “Safe, legal, and rare”. Now, completely normalized, it's the leading cause of death in Canada..And, as reported in the National Post, the woman from BC — Ms Hatch — didn't want to die. She couldn't get the care she desperately needed. It was cheaper to kill her. But the fact that her decision was turned into an advertisement to sell things — to sell products, to sell politics, to sell ideology should be the mirror that shocks us out of this pretence..We don't stop suffering by killing people..Any country taken with the belief that this practice is good for individuals, families, and our country going forward is in the grip of something that is, indeed, not beautiful.
