House MD
Watched House MD on Sunday night, and I caught this interesting dialogue:
Rebecca: I just want to die with a little dignity.
House: There’s no such thing! Our bodies break down, sometimes when we’re 90, sometimes before we’re even born, but it always happens and there’s never any dignity in it. I don’t care if you can walk, see, wipe your own ass. It’s always ugly, always. [Pause] You can live with dignity, we can’t die with it.
Two observations:
Dr House, of course, is right at one level. Death is not dignifying, both in the cause of death and the decay of the body after death. Thus the argument that one could prefer certain means over another so that one could “die with dignity” is a moot point: whatever way one dies, the body still rots.
However, at another level, there is something more than the indignity of death. The resurrection means that death is no longer the slavedriver as it once was. “Death is swalled up in victory” (Isaiah 25:8; 1 Corinthians 15:54). Thus Paul can honestly share about death in Philippians 1:18-26.