For some time my grandmother suffered from type 2 diabetes for a number of years. She was in and out of hospital almost every month in those years. The family had their own dreams and wishes they had hoped my grandmother would live to see so throughout her illness and hospital visits, hope was never lost. She also wanted to be around to see me graduate and work as a health care professional and exercise my skills of physiotherapy on her. However, through out all this hope there were times where my grandmother wanted to give it all up, she would pray and ask God to take her life because of the pain. See the things is the rest of the family was not experiencing the pain she was, they did not understand how it felt to spend Christmas on a hospital bed, all they wanted was for her to just fight through it all.

If there had been knowledge on living will, I would guess that my grandmother could have went about it and had someone she trusts execute her life, her pain was absolutely terrible but we did not understand that. She finally passed away in 2017 due to failure on deterioration of her only kidney as she struggled to find a transplant. Not to say that she did not contribute to our lives at the time she was alive and sick but she went through pain and she did not deserve to. Maybe she needed the knowledge of living will to decided upon herself what she wants. 

A living will is a declaration or an advance directive which will represent a patient’s wish to refuse any medical treatment and attention in the form of being kept alive by artificial means when the patient may no longer be able to competently express a view (South African Medical Association Hum Rights, Law and Ethics Unit). Even though a person can choose on a living will to not be kept alive when they are at a state of being terminally ill, there is in South Africa at present no law regarding the validity or enforceability of a living will. People may choose to instruct not be kept alive at a state of terminal illness to avoid cost of getting treatment when they might not even get better, to relieve family and friends from the trauma of seeing the person in a vegetative state – if it gets there, or even freeing themselves from constant pain which might be deemed as suffering. This may rather be devastating and traumatic for the family to execute because most people depend on the hope of their family member getting better.

The South African Human Rights Charter 12.2(b) states that everyone has a right to bodily and psychological integrity, which includes the right to security in and control over their body. Patients can make their own decisions concerning their lives, even though this may be dreadful for the family or person in charge of executing the patient’s wishes, it will need to be done. Most of family members and friends do not take into consideration how much the ill person is suffering, enduring pain day in and day out all for trying to meet up with the hope of them getting better.

Since there is no law that enforces a living will, the South African Medical Association has put guidelines in place that will assist doctors who are confronted with a living will. One of the declarations for terminal illness states that, “A doctor may relieve suffering of a terminally ill patient by withholding treatment with the consent of the patient or his immediate family if the patient is unable to express his will. Withholding of treatment does not free the doctor from his obligation to assist the phase of his illness and a doctor shall refrain from employing any extraordinary means which would prove of no benefit for the patient.” This means that a doctor has the responsibility to let the patient choose to die if that is their definition of relieving suffering.

No one wants to be held in suffering from a disease that is not curable or cannot be adequately treated, living through pain a daily basis knowing that you will die anyway. Other people come to this decision so that their family members do not need to undergo financial distress during funeral arrangements with most of the money spent on treatment.