Zoraya ter Beek's last cup of coffee

"Ask your doctor if suicide is right for you"

Benelux has pioneered legalized euthanasia – what Michel Houellebecq has called the “European way to die.” The author excoriates those who choose what he calls “servitude” in the face of chronic pain.

Other right-wing reactions include the recent Free Press profile of Zoraya ter Beek, an able-bodied 28-year-old who has asked her government to kill her. No clinical diagnosis is discussed in the profile, but her psychological treatment providers say that they have exhausted all options.

Medically managed death for hipsters, sneers the Free Press, noting the patient’s suicide-referencing upper arm tattoo. Calling out liberal overreach is the stock-in-trade of that publication. Still, there was a physical detail in the story that startled me, and it wasn’t the tattoo.

Her liberation, as it were, will take place at her home. “No music,” she said. “I will be going on the couch in the living room.” She added: “The doctor really takes her time. It is not that they walk in and say: lay down please! Most of the time it is first a cup of coffee to settle the nerves and create a soft atmosphere.

There are many possible reactions to this, beyond the predictable invocation of the sanctity of life or the danger of giving the state the power to kill. One could easily feel sympathy for a suffering person, or an opposition to a culture that gives up on people, some of whom are as young as twelve.

But my first reaction was to think about that cup of coffee. What is the point of coffee in one’s final moments? I appreciate that a mild stimulant can have a paradoxical calming effect. A little caffeine to get primed in the morning or I guess also to return to a mindset that feels familiar, ter Beek’s “soft atmosphere.”

This is all in the context of productivity though. Isn’t coffee a tool for accomplishing things? In this instance we have a “patient” who is forswearing any more accomplishments, ever again.

It appears that ter Beek’s doctor plans to use coffee to normalize the encounter. Maybe the drink will afford ter Beek a certain independence of thought – one of the conceptual problems with euthanasia is that death’s appearance changes the closer we get to it. What might have appeared like the only option could become one of many after a little caffeinated reflection. In order to compassionately offer someone an end to their life, it’s morally required to encourage them to focus on alternatives. And coffee could help with that focus.

Bigert and Bergström’s brilliant documentary The Last Supper has interviews with a penitentiary cook who prepares death row meals. He notes that his food is utterly unique in that it is not for nourishing a body or mind. It won’t even be digested fully. With the state removing any pretense of a future, the only reason to eat is pleasure.

The coffee that Zoraya ter Beek is anticipating has a similar function. Caffeine will gently, pleasantly accelerate her heart rate, right up until an injected sedative slows it back down and the pentobarbital stops it altogether. A cup of comfort isn’t much compared to the harder stuff.

I cannot presume to know anything about ter Beek’s life beyond what I read. But if I knew her at all I would try to direct her attention to the pleasant irony of a coffee before suicide. The freedom that she has to manipulate her mental state to be relaxed, or attentive, or inwardly focused. When doctors told her that there’s nothing more they could do for her, that only means that she need not keep listening to them. The interventions of the medical industry and the nostrums of polite society haven’t helped her, but that only means that she is free to live, to have as much or as little coffee as she likes.

. . .

Houellebecq’s rage about our overmanaged lives doesn’t leave room for the details of those lives. Denouncing the decision to die as “servitude” overlooks how much obligation that living can entail, especially for someone in chronic pain. Houellebecq loses me when he denounces those who would ask for relief from suffering, instead of focusing on the wider culture that can’t seem to articulate reasons to keep living.

It’s a culture that also resorts to proceduralism to address difficult questions (I’m reminded of the recent coverage of polyamory that licenses any kind of behavior as long as we talk about it like adults). There are certainly ethical arguments for state-sanctioned suicide, but they are not greatly bolstered by the conscientious professionalism of the death panels.

Still, liberals being liberals, the Netherlands has established the necessary bureaucracy for euthanasia. Doctors report all unnatural deaths to the Municipal Pathologist, and all euthanasia procedures to the Healthcare Inspectorate, comprising doctors, an ethicist and a lawyer. This body decides whether due care is satisfied or whether the doctor who administered euthanasia should be referred to a prosecutor.

In the meantime, the growing number of applicants for assisted suicide appear to include more people with intellectual disabilities including autism. Part of the difficulty of confirming a trend away from patients with terminal illness and those with severe psychological suffering is the secrecy that surrounds legalized euthanasia in Belgium, Canada and Colombia. The Netherlands at least has disclosed some information about the diagnostic profiles of some of its euthanized citizens, although even that data set is only available with the consent of doctors. State-sanctioned death administered in a less than completely transparent way: nearby Germany’s political culture worries about a slippery slope and accordingly has not experimented with legal euthanasia.

. . .

In an earlier draft of this post I downplayed the name and identity of the person profiled in the Free Press piece. I thought that naming her and calling attention to her individual decision felt intrusive, even if she has taken at least one press call. She’s probably not thrilled to be blog-fodder as she steadies herself to choose the void.

But finally I decided to avoid depersonalization, however the afflicted may feel about that. On this side of the line between life and death I want to commemorate the circumstances, the preferences, the tics and everything else that my fellow human beings will have for at least a little while longer. Please join me in raising a glass, or better yet, a mug, in prospective remembrance of Zoraya ter Beek (say her name with me, pronounce the double e like “ay”) and all the other recipients of this unique manifestation of Dutch tolerance.

Further Reading:

Mats Bigert & Lars Bergström, The Last Supper, 2005.

Michael Cook, “Houellebecq Savages Euthanasia,” BioEdge, Jan. 24, 2023.

Euthanasia, assisted suicide, and non-resuscitation on request in the Netherlands, Government of the Netherlands website.

Rupa Subramanya, “‘I’m 28. And I’m Scheduled to Die in May’,” The Free Press, Apr. 1, 2024.