By: Herman Goodden

In the Letters of Vincent Van Gogh to his brother Theo, we find a deeply moving testament of the hope and courage which even one supportive relative or friend can provide to someone undergoing the agonies of depression. During one of his all too brief intervals of lucidity, Vincent was able to express his gratitude in a letter to his brother concerning his recent eviction.

“These last days were sad, with all the moving, taking away all my furniture, packing up the canvasses that are going to you, but the thing I felt saddest about was that you had given me all these things with such brotherly love, and that for so many years you were always the one who supported me, and then to be obliged to come back and tell you this sorry tale…

Ten months after that, Vincent painted one of his most beautifully bold and spare paintings, Branches of an Almond Tree in Blossom to celebrate the birth of Theo’s first son, named Vincent. He no sooner completed that canvas, then his mental health broke down again, more severely than before, shaking his confidence that he would ever be clear of such mental and spiritual tyranny again. That July, Van Gogh shot himself and died from the wounds two days later.

Mark Pickup was in London recently, giving two addresses on The Perils of Decriminalizing Assisted Suicide. He opened his talk by quoting some of the letters of Van Gogh; reminding us that this was an unemployable misfit who sold one painting in his lifetime and was regarded by most of his contemporaries as a useless burden and a menace; that Van Gogh was a frequent asylum inmate who showed signs of mental instability long before he took up a paintbrush in the last six years of his life; that he was an artistic genius whose incredible legacy of paintings might never have been created if at least one person in his life hadn’t urged him not to give up when he couldn’t see any point on carrying on.

Mark Pickup is not a visual artist but this proud and handsome 42-year-old Albertan is a very powerful writer and public speaker who believes that healthy society should never consent to – or suggest – suicide for one of its citizens. A sufferer of multiple sclerosis since 1984, this husband and father was terrified, as over the course of just one week, he went from an able-bodied existence to the world of the disabled, losing all sensation from the waist down and the use of his right hand.

“From 1984 to 1987, I found myself on a relentless slide downhill. The pattern of attack a remission was so volatile that I would go to bed at night not knowing what I would wake up with or wake up without.”

In 1944 just after Michigan’s Dr. Kevorkian helped to kill another Canadian multiple sclerosis sufferer who saw no reason to carry on, Mark came to national attention when he addressed the Special Senate Committee Hearings on Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide: “In the early days of my disability, I needed to grieve my loss. In fact, at about the two to three year point with multiple sclerosis my grief was so unimaginable, my sorrow so deep, my heartache so sharp, that my judgment clouded. I am glad there was no one in the business of granting death wishes back in the mid 1980’s.”

During Mark’s wrenching address in London which had many listeners in tears, there were three occasions when I noticed something like ‘contempt’ take over his otherwise sanguine features. One was when referred to Dr. Kevorkian as “a serial killer.” Two was when he speculated on the coincidence of the rise in the assisted-suicide movement just as governments at every level are finding health care too expensive to deliver at traditional levels. Three, perhaps the most bitter of all, was when he spat out the words “death with dignity” and asked, “Where’s the dignity in having a doctor inject chemical poisons into your bloodstream?”

Under all the platitudes about dignity and compassion, Mark is convinced that, “Euthanasia is hostility disguised a compassion towards the disabled, the chronically and the terminally ill.”

When he was grappling with the onset of MS the last thing Mark needed was “someone standing beside me to odder me death with dignity.” Instead, he needed and gratefully received, the loving ministrations of his wife and family and friends who were “committed to helping me search for life with dignity even when I didn’t care.” [These] people encouraged me and helped me search for purpose and meaning again.