Section 9

Where the reach ends

Five questions this chapter names and hands on.

This chapter sets out the person’s authority at the closing. It does not settle every question beside it. Five are handed on.

Dementia

Some failures of the body attack the person’s own capacity to read themselves. Dementia is the most common.

A person whose picture of their own life has worn away. Whose reading of themselves has broken up. Whose capacity to choose has collapsed as the body failed. Their authority at the closing is not in the same condition as that of a person whose mind is intact.

The chapter sets the authority at full strength where the person’s architecture is intact. Where it has been compromised, the structure requires two things. Advance commitments: what the person decided while they were still intact. And the larger structure reading those commitments back at the threshold, now.

How exactly that works is open work. What counts as an adequate advance commitment. How to read it back. What to do when there is none. The chapter gives the sketch. It does not close the clinical detail.

Children

The chapter has spoken throughout of people whose capacity to choose is intact at the threshold. Children at the closing stand somewhere else.

A newborn has no override yet. So the right to exit, which is the person’s own authority, does not arise. What the larger structure owes a dying newborn is the floor. Pain relief. Presence. Care for the closing.

Older children have a real capacity to choose, but not yet at an adult’s depth. Their reading counts, and it carries weight. But their picture of their own life is still forming. The long record the fifth question relies on does not yet exist at the depth it needs. And pressure from parents and clinicians can be harder to tell apart from the child’s own reading.

The chapter does not pretend the right to exit, at full strength, applies to children unchanged. Parents partly stand in for the person the child would have become. The larger structure partly stands in for what the parents cannot supply. The child’s growing capacity to choose is respected at the depth it has reached.

How the reading runs for older children is open work. But the chapter fixes one fact. A child’s end-of-life decision is not exempt from the test because the patient is a child. The test runs at the depth the child has reached. And the larger structure’s responsibility weighs more, to match.

Suicide outside these conditions

The chapter sets the right to exit at the closing. At the threshold where levels one to four can no longer hold the corridor open as one the person can read from inside.

Suicide where the corridor has not reached that threshold is a different site. No chapter of these books reads it. This chapter does not extend the right to exit there.

If that is where you are, the note at the head of this page is for you.

When the law does not allow it

A person whose corridor has reached the closing. Who has run the six questions. Whose reading is their own. And who lives where the law or the institution does not permit the exit they are reading.

The chapter sets out the authority. It does not close how that authority is put into practice where institutions do not yet line up with it. The chapters on law and on collective force take up what that alignment requires. The chapter names the authority, and notes the gap as open work.

Grief, and what does not close

The person’s window closes at the threshold this chapter sets out.

What the window was a window onto does not close. The interior. The shared structure the person’s records were written into. The larger structure the body was held within. The book calls this the structural-I.

The chapter does not develop it. A later volume of the work carries it at full weight. This chapter sets out the closing of one life, at the bedside. What does not close is not what this chapter is about.

These are limits, not failures. The chapter sets out the person’s authority at the closing. The further reaches are the next work, in the other chapters and the other volumes.

Source. Ø Applications, Chapter 9 — End-of-Life Care and the Right to Exit. The book in full: the420code.org/Applications.pdf. The short edition: the420code.org/models/applications/09-end-of-life-care-and-the-right-to-exit/. The film, The structure’s unpaid debt: the420code.org/films/applications/. Its kill switches: APP-9.1 to APP-9.5.