Image by Dmytro Yarish on Unsplash.
RecentIy I came across a blog post titled Good Grief: Euthanasia for Macular Degeneration in the Netherlands, published on a Right to Life blog. The author was horrified that a woman had been allowed to die in the Netherlands after living with macular degeneration.
He described her condition this way:
“…she was deteriorating. In recent years her vision had got worse owing to macular degeneration…”
But that was only a fragment of the story. This woman also experienced dizziness, significant hearing loss (and as anyone who’s tried knows, hearing aids are notoriously difficult to get right), and even fecal incontinence. Like many older people, she felt “trapped” in a body that was failing her.
As the account goes on:
“Her present situation was due to her advancing age, and little or nothing could be done about it. She felt her life had lost all meaning. However, her mind was still active, and she thirsted for information.”
She wasn’t living with just macular degeneration. She was living with a constellation of incurable, compounding conditions that stripped away the activities that once gave her life meaning. The blog’s title, by spotlighting only one condition, is misleading. It suggests that her suffering was minor—or at least easily managed—when in truth it was not.
Even worse, the author wrote:
“These are certainly not remarkable symptoms in old age…often these depressions in the elderly are treatable with proper geriatric psychiatric interventions.”
Let’s unpack that.
First: These symptoms are remarkable. In any room of people over 80, almost no one will be experiencing vision loss, dizziness, hearing loss, and incontinence all at once. I’d like to see a medical opinion on what percentage of people actually do.
Second: Even if they were “unremarkable,” they are still horrific. Each one alone is difficult. Together, they can erase the possibility of living a meaningful life.
Third: The phrase “often treatable” is slippery. I wrote about this here. “Often” is not “always.” And “treatable” is not “curable.” What one person can endure, another cannot. Values differ, and so do thresholds for pain and indignity.
Most importantly, this woman’s struggles were not imagined. She had real, physical symptoms. There’s no indication she was clinically depressed—and if she were, she would have had good reason. At her age, with multiple degenerative conditions, the odds of being “cured” by psychiatric treatment were near zero.
I’m not quoting this passage because it’s especially notorious—it isn’t. But it is typical of a tragically common view: that older people somehow “should” be able to tolerate multiple serious illnesses, that their suffering is either trivial or merely psychological.
This belief is not new. Certain groups of people, whether by race, class, or age, have long been assumed to feel less pain. But that is a dangerous and false assumption. Pain is pain. Losing your independence, mobility, and dignity is devastating at any age.
And when nothing can be done to restore a life worth living, denying relief doesn’t look like protection—it looks like cruel and unusual punishment.
