Farewell, Aruna

May 20, 2015 02:45 am | Updated November 16, 2021 05:03 pm IST

Death finally came as a release to >Aruna Shanbaug . But for others like her in similar situations, the fight for a dignified death goes on. After the brutal rape and strangulation that left her comatose, for more than four long decades Aruna was fed, bathed and dressed like an infant by her nursing colleagues in the King Edward Memorial (KEM) Hospital in Mumbai, where she lay like a vegetable in an isolated room. Her state of suffering moved journalist and author Pinki Virani to move the Supreme Court in 2010 and, after a medical examination the court agreed she was in permanent vegetative state. Additionally, the next year the Supreme Court clarified that passive euthanasia was not illegal. Ironically, despite Aruna being the motivation behind the momentous ruling, Ms. Virani could not win the case and get passive euthanasia sanctioned for Aruna herself because the nurses who cared for her refused to let her go. Noble as they were in their unceasing attention to Aruna, their inability to allow her a dignified death was in many ways a greater misfortune. It was left to Ms. Virani to fight alone for the rights of “a body that is not alive but refuses to die”, as she described it in a documentary. The refusal to see that true compassion might lie in letting go of people who are terminally ill or brain-dead is fiercely fought by those who believe the right to live comes with the right to a dignified death.

Passive euthanasia is withdrawal of life support, food or medicines to terminally ill or brain-dead persons, but families feel enormous guilt because it is widely seen as a callous act. Thus, even if passive euthanasia could be the most compassionate step for the patient, it is usually withheld because families are wary of being perceived as being cruel. In Aruna’s case, the truth is that her own family members withdrew a long time ago. She was kept alive simply because the hospital she worked in and her colleagues took up her case. What would have happened if she had not been a nursing professional? The burden of her vegetative state would have been enormous on her family. The ‘living will’ is a document that allows an individual to make it clear that in the eventuality of terminal illness or coma, he or she has opted for passive euthanasia rather than to be kept alive by artificial means. However, the courts have yet to accept living wills as legal documents. Consequently, despite passive euthanasia being legal it is not widely practised since neither doctors nor families want to take the responsibility. Making living wills legal would be a huge step towards understanding how important it is to allow a dignified death.

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