Sex Robots and Vegan Meat

by Jenny Kleeman

  Lesley and Exit parted ways barely six months after she became the UK coordinator. ‘There was such a difference in what I believed the members deserved to get, and what they were actually getting. Philip was very keen that the UK should keep going forward, and we did try to find common ground, but it really wasn’t there.’ Her contract ended by mutual agreement, she says. ‘I’m so disappointed that it hasn’t turned out to be what I believed it to be. I genuinely thought that they were doing a great thing for an awful lot of people. Having got to know the ins and outs of the organization more, I can’t say I believe that the members are very high on the list of priorities. I think a lot of people have been abandoned, and feel let down.’

  In Berkshire, David is feeling better; the NHS has managed to diagnose his mystery digestive problem. ‘It was plain sailing from then on. We found the right medication and all is good.’

  We sit in his living room, beside his enormous TV, surrounded by ornaments he has collected from his travels overseas. He’s a bit anxious; his daughter will be coming home soon and he doesn’t want to have to explain to her why there’s a journalist on his sofa. But he still very much wants to talk to me – not because he is depressed, this time, but because he is angry.

  ‘Exit has been such a disappointment. The more that I witness, the more I find myself questioning the motives behind it. They are very successful at creating publicity, but given that there’s no infrastructure in the UK or supply chain, you have to ask, what is the publicity for?’

  David had done all the things Exit members are supposed to do. He bought The Peaceful Pill Handbook and ploughed through it. He took out membership so he could attend workshops and chapter meetings. That was the easy part: he just had to give them his credit card details and fill out a form saying how old he was. He says they did nothing to check his age, or the state of his mental health. And David did get the information he was looking for.

  When we first spoke, he told me he knew Exit were charging inflated prices, but he didn’t mind paying extra, because he believed in Philip. But then he started to have doubts.

  ‘They’re dealing with people at their most vulnerable, and people who will do almost anything to achieve their goal,’ he says.

  ‘You were feeling pretty low when you found Exit, weren’t you?’

  He can see where I’m going with this and won’t have it. ‘This, to my mind, has nothing to do with depression,’ he retorts. ‘It is my fundamental belief that everyone should have the right to choose when and where they die. I think the tendency of the anti-euthanasia groups to point the finger at depression and make it a reason for not allowing it is wrong. Yes, absolutely, there were times when I got depressed. I was never at a point where the depression took over. I’m not underestimating the power of depression. But being depressed doesn’t necessarily drive you to suicide.’

  The thing that’s really made David angry is the Destiny machine. ‘It sounds like the panacea, it sounds amazing. You send off £200, and you get this machine, thank you very much, all your problems are solved. But when you look more closely, the machine seems to depend on a whole collection of ancillaries that you have to have with it to make it work. You need a canister with a mixture of gases in it that currently doesn’t exist.’ He’s talking about the carbon monoxide/nitrogen mix both Destiny and the Mercitron used. ‘Even if it were to exist, when you compare it to the nitrogen Exit International are selling, that costs hundreds of pounds. On top of the price of the £200 you’ve paid for your Destiny machine. According to The Peaceful Pill Handbook, it’s never been used. It’s unproven technology. But it was massively, massively hyped.’

  Amid the publicity when Philip unveiled Destiny in Edinburgh, David wanted to find out if he could be one of the first customers to buy it. ‘I wrote to Exit International on at least two occasions, enquiring how the whole system worked, what was included, what wasn’t included, what you’d have to buy. And unfortunately I got ignored.’ He thinks the machine was never anything more than a stunt. ‘It was just about raising the profile of Exit International. They want to increase membership. They want people to subscribe to the handbook. That kind of publicity can only help them. Especially since the right to die bill went through the Commons – that was such a mild proposal, and there was such a massive vote against it, so it probably won’t be looked at again for quite a few years.’

  Philip readily admits that nobody has ever used the Destiny machine to die. He’s cited vague ‘legal reasons’ that mean the project can only remain a prototype. Perhaps Sarco will come to nothing, like Destiny and the CoGen, beyond generating headlines. But I’m not so sure. Philip’s plans for Sarco seem so much more concrete. He told me he has premises secured in Switzerland for Exit’s new assisted dying clinic where Sarco will be ‘the centrepiece’, due to open in a few months. Sarco 2.0 is being printed as we speak – this one has a base you can actually pour nitrogen into. And Exit have already been sending out press releases with the name of the first person in line to use Sarco in Switzerland: a forty-one-year-old American woman with MS, called Maia Calloway.

  David hasn’t renewed his membership. He doesn’t need to; he found out what he needed to know and has managed to cobble together his own suicide kit using suppliers he found online that have nothing to do with Exit. I guess that’s the flaw in Exit’s business model: if it successfully fulfils its members’ needs, its membership numbers will necessarily fall away.

  David likes talking about his equipment. ‘You have to do your research,’ he says.

  ‘Everything you’ve bought is legal, and bought from legal sources?’

  ‘Totally legal.’

  ‘Was it challenging, getting hold of all of it?’

  ‘Yes it was. I had to import some things from abroad. It’s a bit like a jigsaw puzzle. You have to put the different elements together to make it work. I have a technical background, and even I have struggled with certain aspects of putting this together. I think the majority of Exit members have no understanding of the mechanics, and essentially want to buy an off-the-shelf kit which will deliver what they want with an instruction manual, a flat-pack instruction manual – plug A into B, do C, there’s your result.’

  He leads me up the stairs to his bedroom, on the top floor. There is a wardrobe near the door. He stoops to pull out a tangle of tubes, canisters and regulators from some low hiding place. It’s all a bit rushed; he really doesn’t want his daughter to find us here now, but he’s proud of what he’s achieved, and he wants me to see it.

  ‘That’s everything you need to take your own life?’

  ‘Yes, right there in my cupboard.’

  I try to imagine being able to sleep soundly when I’m a metre away from the device that will one day kill me.

  ‘Doesn’t it make you feel uncomfortable, knowing that you have this in your bedroom?’

  ‘No,’ he says, firmly and deliberately. ‘It’s my comfort and my insurance policy. It gives me peace of mind. Many, many people have a fear of becoming old, becoming sick, becoming incapable, becoming a burden to other people. Lots and lots and lots of people don’t want that to happen. If you can provide yourself with the means to an end – literally! – that will, at the time of your choosing, prevent you becoming a burden to someone else, it takes away the fear of the future.’

  David does not need a death machine. He needs to live in a world where ageing, disease and death are no longer terrifying; a world where we learn to live alongside our mortality, and are prepared to confront illness and death as a natural part of life. For that, we need proper investment in research into dementia, motor neurone disease and the other conditions that strike so much fear into our hearts; we need better funding of palliative care and social care, so that no one can ever consider themselves a ‘burden’. Because the people who desire to have control over their own deaths often really want dignity and reassurance, not death itself.

  And, more than anything, we need the right to die to be enshrined in
law. We need to find a way of legalizing assisted dying without endangering vulnerable people who want to live. That will take more intellectual effort than designing a death machine, and it won’t make anyone rich or famous, but until we get it right, desperate people will be left open to exploitation.

  * * *

  Maia Calloway is not hard to find. She’s left her email address in the comments section of a blog post she’s written about the right to die, and when I send her a message she replies within minutes. ‘I’d be more than happy to speak to you and contribute in any way,’ she writes. ‘I’m fascinated with the Sarco and what it represents.’ We make a plan to Skype the following day.

  Exit has been sending out regular press releases mentioning Maia. One arrived on the day of the Venice launch, and I read it on the water bus from the airport. It included a picture of Maia smiling on a bench, with a delicate face and ice-blue eyes, a striped shawl draped across her slender shoulders. It mentioned that Maia had already travelled to Switzerland for assisted dying before, but had decided to return to the US.

  Now, almost a year and a half later, Maia thinks her time is near, it read, in breathless bold and italics. And she wants to use Sarco.

  Philip brought Maia up when I spoke to him later that evening.

  ‘I saw the press release,’ I said. ‘She went to Switzerland and changed her mind?’

  ‘She didn’t change her mind so much; she realized, because of her multiple sclerosis, it was a slower process, and she thought, I’ll go back to America. But she’s coming back again. The only thing is whether her timing suits our timing. If the machine is available, she says she likes the concept.’

  ‘She’ll be the first person to use it?’

  ‘If the timing’s right,’ Philip said, holding up his crossed fingers in almost gruesome anticipation.

  When the time comes for our Skype chat, Maia emails to say I’ll need to call her phone; she can’t work out how to launch Skype without her carer there.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ she says when she picks up, her voice quiet but steady. ‘In future, I’ll have all this worked out. I’m just having some cognitive problems with the MS.’ She has just turned forty-one, she says, yet she feels ‘more childlike because of the progression of the illness. It’s like I’m getting younger. I want the comforts of a child: always needing hugs and cuddles, needing to have my food prepared for me, needing to be tucked into bed.’ Maia lives with her best friend in Taos, a small town in New Mexico, in the southernmost range of the Rocky Mountains. Her mother and sister died during the same period when her MS worsened. ‘There wasn’t really anyone to take care of me, other than hired help for a few hours a day. So my friend looks after me. He’s like a big brother.’

  Her openness and her soft voice do make Maia sound childlike. Only minutes into our conversation, a kind of maternal instinct kicks in, and I feel a pang of horror. What is Maia doing in Philip’s world? But when I ask her about what her condition is like on a day-to-day basis, it’s clear that I’m talking to an intelligent, rational adult. She has the articulate vocabulary of the fully grown, college-educated woman that she is.

  ‘It’s just a continuous descent. It’s insidious, like a narrow corridor just getting more and more narrow. You don’t have dementia like you would with Alzheimer’s, but you have severe cognitive impairment, so memory, attention, executive function, being able to learn new tasks – all of those things are severely degraded. Then, with the spinal cord lesions, your arms and legs and torso stop functioning.’ Paralysis is inevitable, she says. ‘At the point of full paralysis, it’s a lot like motor neurone disease, but it goes on longer. In a year or two I could be fully paralysed but even at that point I will not be judged terminal or hospice eligible, so the last stretch could be a few years of being completely bed bound, having absolutely no control of my bodily functions, having difficulty communicating.’ She is already losing control of her neck, and has breathing problems. ‘I didn’t even really want to see it to this level. I don’t want to go too much further.’

  When Maia was well, she was a fiercely driven woman. She worked in film production and lived for her career. ‘If you asked that former self, “Would you want to live the way I am living now?” I would have said, “Absolutely no.” But actually being able to do it is a lot harder than you might think. That survival instinct kicks in.’

  ‘What do you mean by “actually being able to do it”?’

  ‘I mean either doing something on your own, like Philip’s Peaceful Pill Handbook, or actually going over there and taking the medicine. I have already gone to Switzerland and got the green light, and I came back because I wasn’t ready.’

  Maia’s account of her visit to Switzerland differs from Philip’s. It wasn’t that she realized the progression of her MS was slower than she had thought; it was more that she couldn’t go through with it. She arrived in Zurich on her own. She was evaluated by doctors from the Lifecircle euthanasia clinic, who set her up with a carer for a few days. She saw some of the local sites, visited a monastery. And then she started to feel guilty.

  ‘I think it was really about shame, the way my culture thinks about the shame of suicide. There’s so much MS in America, and there’s an unspoken agreement in our society that if you have progressive MS, sorry, you’ve just got to learn to deal with it and keep that fighting attitude. You are kind of a poor sport if you can’t see it to the bitter end – you’re less brave, less courageous.’ And then she began to think about her father. ‘There was a whole thing of, You can’t let your dad lose another daughter – that’s forbidden. You don’t go before your elders.’

  However it happens, suicide is never an entirely solitary, individual act. There are always other people involved: those who assist you, those who happen to be near you, those who find you, those who love you that you are leaving behind.

  ‘Did your dad know you were making that trip to Switzerland?’

  ‘No. He found out through one of his busybody friends. He got very angry. He felt betrayed. And I felt, Oh God, my dad’s mad at me; I’m in trouble. I swiftly got back on the plane and came back to my friend who takes care of me. The agreement was that we were going to press on a little longer and do this the right way, giving everybody in the family the information that they deserved, and then hopefully having somebody escort me back when I was absolutely ready. But the irony is, having come back, nothing got accomplished. They do not want to accept this. They don’t want to talk about it. They don’t want to take me to the plane. They certainly don’t want to go over there. The sad part of my story is that having come back to “do it the right way”, their response is still the same.’

  It was in Switzerland that Maia met Philip for the first time. ‘He’s a personal hero of mine,’ she enthuses. They had exchanged emails before, and when she found out they were in the country at the same time she asked if he would meet her. ‘I went up to Grindelwald with my caregiver and I met Philip and Fiona and their little dog, Henny. It was wonderful. We had a pizza, we talked about a lot of stuff. Then he pulled out on his iPhone pictures of this device, and said, “This is what I’ve been working on.”’

  Philip never misses an opportunity. I can picture him now, around the table with his wife, his dog, his new disabled friend and her carer, a slice of pizza in one hand and his iPhone in the other, rolling out the Sarco concept pictures and Soylent Green anecdotes. Maia was impressed. ‘I thought, Wow, this is absolutely fabulous.’ But it didn’t look like it was going to be ready any time soon, so she went back to the US and didn’t think any more of it.

  They stayed in touch. ‘I said, “If I can help you at all, Philip, being an American who is denied the right to die, let me promote your cause.”’ And that’s what happened. ‘Eventually he said, “Would you like to try the Sarco?” And I said, “Well, I will keep it open, and I will tell the media that I am very interested in it because of the ways the laws exclude me.”’

  Maia is choosing her words careful
ly here, because while she’s certainly interested in Sarco, she has no plans to die in it.

  ‘I have very decreased respiratory function and a little bit of – what’s the thing where you are afraid of small spaces?’

  ‘Claustrophobia.’

  ‘Yeah, I have a little bit of that. I think the Sarco is fantastic. It’s beautiful. It’s elegant. What it symbolizes is so wonderful for our world. But for me, with my particular illness and anxiety, I don’t know that it’s the right fit. But I am still fascinated with it, and I think it’s what the future is going to be.’

  But then, before I can even ask, Maia brings up a host of reasons to worry about Sarco.

  ‘When you see in Newsweek that it’s the Tesla of death machines, we have to be careful that we don’t get so wrapped up in the elegance and the chicness of it that we forget that we are talking about life or death, and this is a process that you have to be very rational about.’ Sarco makes death glamorous, euphoric and therefore alluring, but suicide is contagious enough anyway, particularly among the young, particularly when it gets international coverage. In the month after Marilyn Monroe died there was a 12 per cent rise in suicides in the US, and Robin Williams’ death was linked to a 10 per cent rise in suicide rates in the five months after he killed himself. Suicide doesn’t need a new machine to add to its appeal.

  ‘I’m also a little concerned that it could somehow malfunction with any random printing,’ Maia continues. ‘You would never know what abnormality could occur.’ I hadn’t thought about that, even though Alex had readily admitted to me in Venice that printing had been a nightmare because ‘the machines tend to fuck up’. A defective machine would be devastating for anyone who has psyched themselves up to use it. Maia has been talking about Sarco with NuTech co-founder Derek Humphry. ‘Derek said to me, “Things like this have been tried in the past and have had problems. My advice is that, if you’re going to do it and be the first person, somebody ought to be standing by with an injection.” And I thought, Oh shit.’