In Continuum.

This, is Chantal Sebire. She was a ordinary 52 year old French school teacher living in Dijon until she came down with a disease. Chantal discovered that she had cancer after she lost her sense of taste and smell in the early months of 2000, a rare form of cancer known as esthesioneuroblastoma, or ENB, with just two hundred similar cases reported in the last twenty years. ENB is a form of cancer in the nasal area, which may explain why her sense of smell slowly dissipated throughout the years. But in 2002, the cancer eventually developed into an uncommon malignant tumor in the nasal cavity which eventually caused the better part of her face to become serious deformed. In October of 2007, she eventually lost her sense of sight as well, and that was when her condition became known to the rest of the world - not because of the disease, but because of the fact that she pleaded for the government of France to "die with dignity", as she said in an interview last year. I refuse to post the picture of her with the dreadful disease, as I feel that it may disturb some readers out there. But if you are curious enough, typing her name in any search engine is going to bring up a few images of her condition, and let's just say that it is not meant for the faint hearted.

If you have watched the movie called Total Recall, the one with Arnold Schwarzenegger running about and killing bad guys on Mars, you'd know what I am talking about when I say that the scene at the end of the filmed disturbed me to no end. It's the scene when Arnold and Rachel Ticotin's character got shot out of the cave and onto the side of a Martian hill. They were out of oxygen and were being heavily exposed to radiation from the sun at that time, and that caused their faces to swell and disfigure, their eyes were bulging out of their sockets and their tongues sticking out of their mouths, crying in pain. If you remember that particular scene, you'd be able to picture how Chantal Sebire looked like after she discovered her disease. She looks exactly the same as Arnold on the surface of Mars, but without the makeup and all the predictable heroism in a typical Hollywood science fiction movie. She died yesterday in her own home, alone and her plea to the president utterly rejected. Without dignity, without anybody there in the time of death, Chantal Sebire left. 

The topic of euthanasia has been a rather controversial one in most countries, something which needs to be addressed but nobody ever found time to do so. A law to state that patients can be put to death if they so wish, with the help of doctors and medication to induce the process. So far, only certain countries like Switzerland and Netherlands allow euthanasia to be practiced, but that is not the case for most people around the world with similar wishes. In this case, it is difficult to say that who is right and who is wrong, because to aid in a patient's death would be against the oath all doctors took before they actually became doctors. It'd be a form of murder, and the word "murder" just makes everything so much more serious, so much more wrong. I remember those GP paper we wrote in Junior College, how we were introduced to the idea of euthanasia for the very first time. It was a hot topic of debate even in a typical school essay, but the same cannot be said in various countries around the world. Most of us don't talk about it, most of us think a perfect country such as Singapore wouldn't need such a law to accommodate people who want to kill themselves. But the truth is, however, there are a lot of people out there living with their deformities, their terminal diseases, and I can bet a lot of them want death to take their pain away. 

Suicide is illegal in Singapore, and we are talking about the conventional way of killing yourself. If you decide to jump down from your apartment, hang yourself from a ceiling fan, step in front of a moving truck, or throw yourself into a river with rocks in your pockets, they are all considered to be against the Singaporean law no matter what reasons you might provide in your suicide letter. The police actually handcuffs these dead bodies, no matter what state they are in - and by state we are talking about a bloated corpse or a smashed pulp. It may seem like a ridiculous thing to do, but that's what the police in Singapore does when you kill yourself. It is illegal to take your own life, and it is certainly not going to be encouraged when you want a doctor to aid you in your own death, to end your agony and your sufferings. And for the most part, the rest of the world agrees. France allows the doctors to "indirectly" cause a patient's death, only for those in extreme comatose conditions and under the supervision and the consent of the family members. They "pull the plug", so to speak, and the lack of life support causes the death of the patients - not the doctor. In that context, it is legal. 

But Chantal Sebire wasn't a patient bound to the hospital bed with tubes sticking out from her stomach and wrist. Other than her facial deformities, Chantal was a perfect human being, with the same ability to function properly in the society and have the same sets of emotions that we have. Under the law of France, she cannot receive any form of aid when she wanted the country to approve her own suicide, and no doctors wanted to risk their careers to do so either. So for six years, she has been "living with suffering", as she mentioned in an interview with TIME magazine, when her case was first brought to attention. It's a difficult question to answer, if you are a person running the government and receiving a letter from one of your citizens, wanting to die because of a certain disease. Being a Catholic country, the church disallows euthanasia to be a part of the laws in France, which meant that allowing her death would be to go against the church and a million other Catholic devotees. But to disallow her death would be to cause even more suffering on her part. It is a question that is difficult to answer, it really is. 

Somehow, I think, Chantal must have found certain medication from other countries and killed herself. Suicide, to me, was never a very wise choice in any context. That was until I read the book called The Virgin Suicides by Jeffery Eugenides that changed my perspectives drastically. It is possible to kill oneself without hating life, but loving it to much. Chantal was probably one of such people, someone who loved her life so much that she couldn't tolerate herself suffering on a day to day basis. Just looking into a mirror, or any reflective surface would be a reminder of the loss of her better days, and I can somehow relate to that in a way. I remember getting my head shaved for the army in the later days of 2004, and I refused to look at myself in the mirror or any reflective surface. I was afraid of what I'd see to be honest, and that lasted for almost a week when I finally took up the courage to give myself a peek. It wasn't too bad in the end, but I still felt incredibly strange without the hair to cover my head, I felt incredibly naked, or vulnerable, but perhaps that is why the army still enforces this rule until this day.

Of course, my case is trivial as compared to Chantal's. I had my hair shaved off, she had her face disfigured, it is the worst analogy ever. But I guess I know what she must have went through, because I went through that dear of facing myself for a week in the past. Imagine knowing a deadly virus infested in your body, and there isn't anything you can do about it. This isn't the normal kind of cancer that attacks your internal organs from the inside. This is a cancer that takes away your dignity, takes away your pride, and it certainly is very hard to face yourself when you are in that physical state. So should all patients with terminal disease just wait for their heart to stop one day despite the excruciating pain, or are they free to choose their means of exit? If we can pick the song that they play on our funeral and the kind of food provided, shouldn't there also be a way for us to choose the way that we die when we are in similar medical conditions? Death, in the most conventional sense, is the end of life. But to Chantal, I feel, her life ended a long time ago. 

So, I don't know. I feel that countries should have more flexible laws when it comes to people with certain diseases, people with valid reasons to die rather than a debt that they cannot pay or a nasty break up. Suicide is an option, to me, rather than something that should be condemned by the public in general. It is your life and something that you have control over, unless you take into account other religious reasons. Some might argue that there are cases worse than Chantal's, people with worse physical disfigurement than hers. Take Juliana Whitmore for example, a little girl born without properly formed facial bone structure. Her face probably looks as if somebody poured acid on her, and it is absolutely horrendous to look at as much as I hate to admit. However, she is living a happy life right now with people that love her, and people are going to take her case to argue against euthanasia, and accuse the people seeking death to be those of little will to live, that they are weak. 

But we are all different individuals, aren't we? Not everybody grew up with a certain condition, not everybody can get used to it and live a life as normal as others. Not everybody takes suicide as a crime, some takes that as a solution. I think Chantal should have been allowed to take her own life, or at least with the aid of somebody else. But I guess, the solution to that problem, doesn't matter anymore. It breaks my heart to watch her interviews, to know that under that tumor is a perfectly normal human being, a good mother of three and she must have been a great teacher too. To know that even for somebody suffering from this dreadful disease, one cannot pick her own medication - even if it is death - just saddens me. It just makes someone even more helpless, even less hopeful, and much more resentful of themselves. "At least she is in a better place now", people always say to comfort somebody else. Well, she is in a better place, right now.