In these conditions of acute moral suffering, can we still consider that the choice that is formed is “free”? The comments, sometimes hateful, around the social utility of the elderly that circulated during the pandemic, have left traces with, in the background, the question of the value of a life, “a life that is worth be lived”.
In a society that is still too colonized by a commercial and ageist spirit, the pressure remains, particularly palpable, towards people in a situation of vulnerability (i.e. those who are unable to protect or defend themselves and who can easily be injured).
These testimonies say something regarding our ways of relating. We know that people who have reached the end of their lives are deeply permeable to the way we look at them.
We see, here, to what extent those we accompany have sometimes strongly internalized these devaluing discourses: that of old age as shipwreck, that of the economic weight for the family circle, for society in general. This same society which is sometimes inhospitable to those whose daily lives are marked by extreme, deep and lasting loneliness.
The Little Brothers of the Poor warn of the ravages of social isolation, the cruel phenomenon of solitary death, the invisible suicide of the elderly. They will always be attentive to the most fragile of our elderly fellow citizens. They will always defend the fact that there is no “tiny life”.
Magali Assor is project manager for the “ethical reflection process and the fight once morest abuse” at the Little Brothers of the Poor.
