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unfolded73 · 5 years

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Decisions (1/1) - schitt’s creek ff

Flashbacks to all the little decisions that brought David and Patrick together to their wedding night. Canon compliant through S5. Rated Teen, 5.6k

Yeah, I’ve got it bad for these two.

(ao3)

~~~~~~~~~~

“Was that okay?” David let his hand slide across Patrick’s abdomen, nails scratching through the hair below his navel. He spooned up against Patrick’s back, ignoring the post-coital sweatiness for once in order to cuddle.

“Okay?” Patrick laughed, or more accurately, giggled. “Did you really ask if that was okay? Because I think I might’ve actually blacked out for a minute there.”

David hummed, the path of his hand continuing to Patrick’s hip. “It’s just, it’s our wedding night, so I felt a certain amount of pressure to live up to expectations. Wedding night sex should be, you know, top five sex.”

Patrick rolled over to face him, his nose nuzzling against David’s bare chest. “Contrary to popular belief, I don’t actually keep score on our sex life.”

“Still--”

“It was amazing. You’re amazing.” Patrick kissed him. “You, my husband, are amazing.”

David tried not be thrilled by being called husband, he did, but his hammering heart had other ideas. He remembered stumbling out onto a Manhattan balcony the morning that gay marriage had been legalized in the States, hungover and with only a vague memory of whom he’d gone to bed with the night before, listening with half an ear as his polyamorous performance artist girlfriend at the time lectured her friends about the fact that marriage was a heteronormative construct to which the queer community never should have aspired in the first place. They all nodded sagely, taking drags off their cigarettes in the morning sunlight. David had nodded too, nodded in agreement that marriage was a prison, a trap, a refuge for desperate and weak-willed breeders. It sometimes occurred to him these days that his opinions back then had been thoroughly molded by those around him, pressed into his mind like handprints into soft concrete. Daniella said marriage was a construct, so David believed marriage was a construct. He wondered (not for the first time, or even the hundredth) what that David would think of him now, looking forward to a settled life with this one man who wore sensible Oxford shirts that he bought at the outlet mall in Elmdale.

“Do you ever think about all the tiny decisions we made that led us here?” Patrick asked.

David shook himself out of his reverie. “Hmm?”

Patrick pulled away far enough to be able to focus on his face. “I mean, there’s any number of ways that if things had gone slightly differently, you and I would never have met. Or at the very least, would never have ended up in business together. Or in a relationship.”

“See, I try not to think about things like that, because imagining never being with you would be very upsetting for me. And you know I don’t like my eyes to get puffy.”

“Yeah, you mentioned that to me several times today.”

“Well, it’s important,” David responded, lifting his hand and gesturing in the air for emphasis.

“Important enough to say during the ceremony, though?”

“It’s just that your vows were very emotional.”

“Yeah, I said those things because I like to watch your eyes get puffy,” Patrick said, smirking at him.

David huffed in annoyance, even has he cupped the back of Patrick’s head, fondly stroking the short hair above his neck. “Anyway, no, I don’t get all Gwyneth in Sliding Doors about my life choices.”

“I never saw that movie.”

David reared back, his eyes widening in horror. “Okay, I’m going to need a divorce.”

“Or we could just watch the movie,” Patrick said, grinning, and then leaning in to kiss him.

David hummed and smiled against Patrick’s lips. “Yeah, I suppose we could just watch the movie.”

~*~

Patrick opened the door of his increasing barren apartment to see Rachel standing there. Her eyes were red from crying, and his stomach twisted with guilt at the sight of her.

“Can I come in?” she asked, and what was he supposed to say to that other than yes, so yes is what he said, stepping back to admit her into the cardboard box forest of his living room.

Rachel looked around despondently. “So you’re really moving?” She was dressed in yoga pants and a sweatshirt, her long, red hair pulled back in a messy ponytail. Patrick wished he could hug her because he really needed a hug, but he kept his hands shoved deep in the pockets of his jeans.

“Yeah.”

Her shoulders drooped at that, as if just by asking, she might make him change his mind and stay. Which, given their past, probably wasn’t an unreasonable thing for her to think.

“And you’re just going to drive; you don’t even know where you’re going to live?”

Well, no, that part of the plan he’d told Rachel wasn’t true. He’d wanted it to be true -- wanted to be the kind of person who could just uproot his entire life on a whim and head off into the sunset with no clear idea where he was going to end up. But Patrick was a planner, and in the end he’d been too anxious to go through with that level of spontaneity. Instead he’d browsed job websites until he found something weird but promising, working for a guy named Ray who’d hired him over the phone after a lengthy, very chatty interview. He’d even be able to rent a spare room in Ray’s house, so if Ray turned out to be a serial killer, at least Patrick was making himself fully available to murder at any time of the day or night. He liked to be accommodating that way.

He didn’t want to tell Rachel any of this.

She laughed bitterly. “And here I thought this time, the engagement would stick.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t apologize to me, I’m sick of your apologies. All you ever do is apologize to me.”

So she came here to berate him, then. Great. Not that he didn’t deserve it, with as many times as he’d broken her heart.

“But I guess that you don’t want to marry me so much that this time you can’t even stand to be in the same town as me,” she continued.

He and Rachel had been best friends in high school, inseparable, and everyone expected them to start dating from the time they were fifteen. Everyone expected it so much that it was like they willed the relationship into existence, and Patrick let himself be swept along with the tide of their expectations. He’d kissed her for the first time after one of his baseball games because he knew he was supposed to. He’d had mediocre sex with her the night of their spring formal because their friends expected it. He’d come home from college and asked her to marry him because his parents and her parents and even the lady who worked the register at the local hardware store had been hinting at him about it. Then a few months later, faced with the fact that being engaged to someone meant you had to actually marry them, he’d panicked and broken off the engagement. That was only the first time he’d broken off their engagement.

It was possible that Patrick was an asshole.

“I just need a fresh start with my life, I can’t--” Stay here. Face you. Face my parents.

“So then go to Toronto, or Chicago, or somewhere normal that people go when they’re trying to get away from home.”

“It’s expensive to live in those places. And I’m a small town guy.”

“I don’t want you to go. I still--” She hiccupped a tiny sob. “I still love you, Patrick.”

He felt like he still loved her too, and also that he’d never had a clear idea of what love actually was. But he knew he couldn’t marry her. With so much uncertainty in his life, he was finally certain of that, albeit several years too late.

“Please don’t go.”

It would make a lot of people happy if he stayed. Rachel, his parents, his buddies from high school who still liked to drink cheap beer and watch hockey. The lady from the hardware store. In leaving, he was disappointing everyone. He could agree not to go, and that weight of disappointing everyone would lift.

Replaced by a heavier weight that he couldn’t quite define, but that had been pushing him down his whole life.

“I’m sorry, Rachel. I have to go.”

~*~

This fucking motel smelled funny, that was why he couldn’t sleep.

David turned over one more time, trying to get comfortable between the scratchy, low thread count sheets. He pulled the sleeve of his designer sweatshirt over his hand and cupped it over his face and inhaled, his eyes squeezed shut as he tried to imagine that he was back in his own bed at his parent’s mansion. Or the bed in his Manhattan loft. Or even the bed of a stranger as he avoided the wet spot on the sheets and wondered if it would be easier just to leave now rather than waiting until morning. Literally anywhere would be better than this hellhole.

Flipping onto his back violently, David huffed out a breath.

“Oh my God, David, can you stop fidgeting for like, two minutes?”

“Fuck off, Alexis.”

She made an unhappy squeaking noise. “You don’t have to be such a dick to me all the time, you know.”

“I think I do.” He was still furious at her that she would have left with Stavros, abandoning him to their mother’s misery and their father’s misplaced optimism and this place.

“I could leave too, you know,” he added.

“Oh really, David? Where would you go?”

“To New York, where I lived.”

“Your apartment is gone, David.”

“I have friends, Alexis.”

“Oh, do you. Name one.”

He opened his mouth, but before he could say a person who definitely existed and wasn’t made up, Alexis added, “And I mean someone who would actually care enough about you to let you crash on their sofa now that you’re poor. Also, how would you even get to New York? We don’t even have a car. Or money for a plane ticket on a…” -- and here she shuddered -- “commercial airline.”

“Believe me, if I wanted to find someone to put me up in New York, I could. There are men who would be more than happy to send me a plane ticket if I asked.”

“Ew, David. Like a sugar daddy? Even you should have more self-respect than that.”

He snorted. Self-respect. As if.

“And anyway, you’re not the young twink you once were; no one’s going to pay you to be their boy toy now,” she added.

“Jump off a bridge, Alexis,” he said, in no small part because he feared what she said was true. He didn’t have any friends who’d cared about anything but his money and connections, and he probably was too old to attract the attention of someone who might support him financially just because he was pretty and good at sucking dick. A small voice in the back of his head told him he was better off without those kinds of people. He ignored it.

“Fine, prove it. Leave,” she huffed. “Go to New York and find some skeevy guy to support you, see if I care.”

A part of him was so angry with Alexis that he almost got up at one thirty in the morning and stormed out of the room. He’d find a way to get out of this town somehow. He’d walk. He’d hitchhike. He’d sprout wings and fly.

After a long pause during which he stayed under the too-thin bedding, David said, “I can’t leave, I need to be here for Mom. She won’t survive this without me.”

“Yeah, that’s why you’re staying,” Alexis muttered sarcastically.

“Shut up.”

“You shut up.”

~*~

“Feeling better?” Stevie asked as she took the joint out of his hand and put it to her lips. David watched as she took a deep drag and held the smoke in her lungs for a few seconds before blowing it up at the sky.

He leaned back on the worn picnic table behind the motel and looked up at the way the light filtered through the trees. Schitt’s Creek could be oddly beautiful when viewed from the right angle. And when high.

“Yeah. Better.”

“Done freaking out about the store?”

“Probably not, but I am presently done freaking out. At present.”

Stevie giggled, and David rolled over on the table to take the joint back from her.

“It’s the consignment part of it that’s crucial, but I wasn’t able to impart that to that uptight little cutie at Ray’s.”

“You talk like your mother when you’re high.”

David gasped, sitting up. “You take that back.”

Stevie blinked at him. “I just mean you use bigger words. Unnecessarily large words,” she overennunciated. “Wait, you said ‘cutie.’”

“Who did?” He shook his head side-to-side, trying to clear it. “I mean, I said what about what?”

“You said ‘that uptight cutie at Ray’s.’ He’s cute? You failed to mention that, you just said he was snippy.”

“He’s not cute; he was pressuring me to fill out a form. Nothing about that was cute.” David stretched back out on the picnic table.

“And yet you said it.”

“Also I’m pretty sure he was wearing Levi’s.”

Stevie clutched at her heart. “Oh my God.”

“You may not think I can tell when you’re making fun of me but I actually can. I just mean he’s not my type. Which doesn’t matter because I’m sure he’s straight. He was pretty much wearing the straight boy uniform.”

“You sure are worried about what this non-cute boy’s sexual preferences are, David.”

“Nuh-uh.”

Stevie didn’t respond to that, and so they were silent for a while. David continued to squint up at the sunlight-dappled trees and Stevie… thought her Stevie thoughts. David imagined this is what his teen years would have been like if he’d grown up with no money in a town like this: getting stoned with a friend on a sad picnic table behind a motel. No parties with half-naked models and bowls of ecstasy. At the moment, he couldn’t put his finger on any reason why this would have been such a bad way to grow up. He certainly could have used a friend like Stevie in those years. Someone to support him and to call him on his bullshit.

David took a deep breath and broke the silence. “I guess what I wanted to say before I was stoned is, maybe it’s not too late for me to give up on the store idea. My mother was right, I’ve never done anything like this on my own before, and any belated maternal instinct she may have had to encourage me--”

“David Rose, don’t you dare give up on the store. I’ll be furious with you if you do, I mean it.”

“There’s a lot I don’t know about running a business.”

“I know. But you can ask your dad for help. Or you can ask the cutie at Ray’s.”

“I hate you,” he said, but he reached into his pocket and ran his finger along the edge of Patrick’s business card.

“Please don’t give up on it, David.”

He rolled over and looked at Stevie, her black hair tousled in the light breeze. He felt the sudden urge to tell her he loved her, but he figured that was just the marijuana talking. He bit his lips to keep the declaration in and sat up. “I’m going to go down to the store,” he announced.

“To do what?” she asked, hopping down off the picnic table and taking David’s hand to pull him to his feet. The world tilted alarmingly on its axis from this new vantage point.

“To work on my business plan.”

~*~

Patrick called his parents on Sunday afternoons without fail. He felt like if he didn’t stick to the schedule, if he let a Sunday go by and didn’t call them, then he’d start going longer and longer between calls and eventually he’d barely talk to them at all. So he called, right on schedule, even though the thought of talking to them today had caused a ball of anxiety to form in his stomach for some reason that he couldn’t explain.

After the exchange of pleasantries and listening to the latest gossip from his hometown, an uncomfortable silence descended.

“So, I… uh…” Why was this so hard to talk to his parents about? Patrick squeezed his eyes shut and pressed the phone harder against his ear. “I’m not going to be working for Ray anymore.”

“Oh,” his mom said, and he could hear the mixture of confusion and worry in that one little syllable. “That didn’t last very long, did it?”

“I know you said Ray’s a little… scattered, but you probably need to give it some more time, son,” his father said in that deep, sonorous voice that Patrick had failed to inherit.

“Does that mean you’ll be coming back home?” his mom asked, and shit, of course she would jump to that conclusion.

“No, no no, that’s not why I’m… I’m going into partnership with another guy to help him run a store.”

“What guy?” his father asked at the same time his mother said, “A store?”

“Um, his name is David,” Patrick said, and it felt weirdly thrilling and forbidden to speak David’s name out loud to his parents. He frowned; what an odd thought. “The general store in town closed down, and David’s leased it to turn it into a space where he’s going to sell products from local vendors on consignment. It’s a good business model.”

“It sounds interesting,” his dad said, which sounded like a diplomatic way of saying ‘risky.’ Or perhaps a diplomatic way of saying ‘I can’t fathom why you would you give up a good job and a relationship with a lovely girl like Rachel to move to the ass end of the world and drift from one job you’re overqualified for to another.’

“It should be. I’m excited about it.” He paced across the floor, suddenly anxious to get off the phone.

“I saw Mr. Stephens a few days ago,” his father said.

“Oh, yeah?” Theo Stephens had been Patrick’s boss at the bank.

“He said your job is still available if you want to come back home.”

“Tell him he really needs to hire a replacement,” Patrick said.

“I think he did, but it didn’t work out. So he’s looking again to fill the position, and I thought--”

“I’m staying here in Schitt’s Creek, Dad.”

“Don’t take this the wrong way, but why? What does that town have that your hometown doesn’t?”

A rush of images filled Patrick’s head. The clean white walls of the store, and the nice way it smelled now that he and David had washed everything thoroughly and filled it with skin and hair care products. The way David smirked when Patrick said something witty and sardonic, like there was a big smile inside of him that he was barely containing. The way David’s long, ringed fingers looked as he pressed labels onto bottles of moisturizer and bags of tea.

“It has the store.”

“Oh, stop giving Patrick a hard time, Clint,” his mother said. “We just miss you, is all.”

Patrick’s face flushed with shame that he was making his mother sad. “I know, Mom. I miss you too.”

“You’ll keep us posted about how it goes with the store?” his dad asked.

“Yeah, of course,” he said, but there was a part of him that never wanted to mention the store to them again. It was his and David’s, and sharing it with people at home, even his parents, felt strangely blasphemous.

“We love you, son.”

“Love you, too.”

The next few days were filled with body milk and spreadsheets of vendors and inventory and laughter and his heart squeezing uncomfortably in his chest every time he looked at David across the room. On Patrick’s next day off, he got up early and went for a hike, like if he didn’t keep moving his skin might turn itself inside out.

Or like he might have to admit that he had romantic feelings for David.

It wasn’t that the thought of being gay had never occurred to him before; he wasn’t born under a rock, after all. But he dismissed it, because gay men weren’t like him. Gay men were like David, fashion-conscious and unaware of what a change-up pitch was. And then there had been Rachel and a few other girls in college, keeping him from seriously questioning his sexuality. He looked straight, he acted straight, he’d had sex with women. Although, true, he’d always wondered what the big deal about sex was, because he’d secretly never thought it was all that great. And true, he’d once sat in a darkened theater watching Avengers and spending a lot more time focusing on Chris Evans than on Scarlett Johansson. But he’d never really fallen for a boy either, and eventually Patrick had concluded that he wasn’t a particularly sexual person. That was a thing, after all; he’d read about it.

Then he met David Rose.

He spent hours working on the store’s budget and thinking about the turn of David’s neck. He stocked shelves and thought about David’s elegant fingers, with those silver rings that would catch the light and attract Patrick’s attention like a moth to a streetlamp. He stared into the middle distance, listening to the jazz that David insisted was an essential part of the store’s aesthetic, and thought about what David’s mouth would feel like on his own.

There was no use denying it: for the first time in his life, Patrick was falling for someone, and it was a man. And while that was confusing enough, the bigger problem was that it was his business partner.

Patrick reached the overlook point, and he stopped to catch his breath, sweat running down between his shoulder blades.

“I’m gay,” he said out loud to the forest, testing the words, the very concept, in his mouth.

“I’m gay. I’m very, very gay for David Rose,” he said, and then laughed. He sounded crazy.

An argument could be made that it would be the wisest course never to act on his feelings because of the business. The most likely outcome to sharing his feelings with David would be a humiliating rejection; Patrick wasn’t the kind of person David would be attracted to, surely, and the best he could hope for would be for David not to laugh in his face. Even if by some miracle David was interested, all that would probably lead to would be a short relationship that would inevitably end, leaving Patrick working day in and day out with the man who’d broken his heart.

He imagined asking David out, and David saying yes. Suddenly it was all he wanted, to go on a date with David, but he didn’t know if he’d have the courage to do it. Still, admitting that he wanted to, admitting what his feelings were, that was almost as good as making the decision to act on them.

“I’m so fucked,” Patrick said to the trees. They nodded in the breeze in agreement.

~*~

It was a rare day off from the store, and all David had wanted to do was sleep until noon and then lie in bed and eat a bag of chips and watch whatever was on the Hallmark Channel, which was available on the new cable package that his dad had gotten for the motel. Instead, his mother had woken him up with a list of chores, the latest of which was helping her to groom her wigs. So putting it mildly, David was crabby. He wanted to text Patrick and tell him about the trials his mother was putting him through, but Patrick was working at the store alone today and he probably wouldn’t appreciate the interruption.

“I like you and Patrick together,” his mother said, and David eyed her suspiciously, wondering if she’d finally learned to read his mind.

“There’s nothing to like yet; we’ve been on one date and we’ve kissed a few times, that’s all.” He combed the wig he was working on a little more vigorously, which got him a reproachful look from Moira.

“Perhaps that’s so, but the spark between you is pellucid for all to see.” She gave him a knowing smile. “He lights up when you walk in the room, and I dare say the reverse is also accurate.”

“Okay, well.” David bit down on a smile, lest he prove her point. “There’s still a lot that can go wrong, that’s all. And when things do go wrong, both my personal life and my business will be fucked, so.”

“Don’t be so fatalistic, David. You mustn’t assume that things will go wrong.”

“Things always go wrong.” He set the hairbrush down with a clatter. “I’m the first guy he’s been with. Literally the first man he’s ever kissed. It’s… it’s like holding a baby bird in my hand while riding a roller coaster. Any minute now we’re going to go over a big drop and I’ll forget and” -- he closed his fist tightly -- “I’ll crush him.”

“A very evocative avian metaphor, darling, but Patrick’s a grown man, not a bébé bird. Inexperienced with some activities, I’m sure, but he doesn’t strike me as someone who can’t take care of himself.” She gave him a sidelong glance. “Are you sure you aren’t the bird on the ferris wheel, David?”

“I said roller coaster,” he responded petulantly. “And hardly.”

Moira looked unconvinced.

“God, what am I doing, getting involved with my business partner? This is the dumbest thing I’ve ever done in a… lifetime of dumb things,” he said with a flourish of his hand in the air. “I should end it now, before things get even messier.”

Tilting her head and regarded him for a moment, Moira reached out and put a hand on his bicep. “You’ve often put your heart in the care of people who have hurt you. But that isn’t because you are feeble-minded. It’s because those people weren’t worthy of you. Patrick, I think, may be worthy of you.”

“Okay, you barely know him.”

His mother just smiled. “I have a good feeling about him, that’s all. Have a little faith in the power of love.”

“Ew.”

She ignored that. “I implore you, David, don’t end things with him before they’ve even begun. Open your heart to the possibility of joy.”

“Ugh.” David went back to combing out the wig. “Fine.”

~*~

“Hey, do you wanna get a drink after rehearsal?” Patrick asked, which made Stevie narrow her eyes at him in confusion.

“David’s not expecting you?”

“We are capable of being apart for an evening.” At Stevie’s skeptical look, he added. “I told him you were stressed about the show and that I was planning to take you out for a drink.”

“So you lied.”

“No, I didn’t. You are stressed about the show, and I was planning to take you out for a drink.”

Patrick was being weird. “What’s going on, Brewer?”

“Nothing’s going on. I. want. to. get. a. drink. Do. you. want. to. get. a. drink.” Each word came out in a monotone.

She huffed. “Sure.”

“Great.” He looked simultaneously frustrated that she was being so difficult and yet pleased that she’d finally agreed.

When they were released by Moira from Cabaret rehearsal, sweaty and exhausted, Stevie was surprised when Patrick led her toward his car instead of down the street to the cafe. “Where are we going?”

“The Wobbly Elm,” he said, unlocking the passenger door and opening it for her.

“We could just go to the cafe,” she said, but she got in the car anyway. Going to the cafe meant she might have to sample one of Twyla’s terrible cocktail experiments.

Patrick got in the car and cranked the engine. “I find that when I have conversations in the cafe, somehow half the town knows what I was talking about by morning.”

Stevie’s suspicion meter edged up a couple more notches. “You are being really weird.”

“I know,” he said, pulling out onto the main road out of the center of town.

“If something bad is happening with David, or if something bad is about to happen, like if you’re planning to break up with him, you better tell me now. If you wait until I’ve got a drink in me at the bar, I might beat you with a pool cue and leave you for dead in the woods.”

Patrick laughed. “Nothing like that, I promise. I don’t think you’ll feel the temptation to beat me to death.” And then he changed the subject to Cabaret, and Stevie let him, because she had an infinite well of frustration to express about the show and her part in it.

He let her rant the whole way to the bar, but once they had their drinks ordered, he put a gentle hand on her arm. “You’re way too hard on your performance, you know. Your voice is actually really good.”

She snorted, taking a large pull from her beer. “It really isn’t. I know what singers are supposed to sound like, and I don’t sound like that.”

“Maybe not, but you sound real, and you sound vulnerable. You’re gonna be a fantastic Sally; I mean that.”

Stevie flushed, uncomfortable with the compliment. “Thanks,” she said, and then cleared her throat. “Okay, what did you drag me all the way out here for?” Now it was Patrick’s turn to look uncomfortable. “Oh. Well, there’s something I want to do, and I’m hoping that if it’s a terrible idea, you’ll talk me out of it.”

“Okay,” Stevie said slowly. “It probably is a terrible idea, but what the hell -- what is it?”

Patrick took a long drink from his beer glass as if for strength. “I’m thinking about asking David to marry me.”

Stevie almost choked on her beer. “Oh my God. Oh my God! Patrick!” She wanted to hug him, but she wasn’t sure if they were hugging friends, or non-hugging friends. “Patrick, that’s amazing!”

He just nodded. “Yes, but is it a terrible idea?”

She had to pause at that. Had David ever mentioned marriage to her, or what he thought of it? She didn’t think so. “Have you ever talked about marriage with him?”

“Not in those terms, but we’re starting to talk about… really long term things. Being together years from now, and what we might do. It just seems like that’s where his head is, like he finally trusts that I’m not going to lose interest in him. And I want to… I guess I’m just a traditional guy at heart and I’d really like to have that whole thing. The wedding. The vows and the cake and the dancing.” He rubbed his hand over his face. “But I don’t know. Maybe he won’t want that.”

“I might’ve assumed that about David at one point, that he wasn’t the marrying kind. But watching him with you, like the way he was with your parents, and planning your birthday party?” Stevie smiled, and then suddenly she had to force back tears. “I think if I had to place a bet on it, I’d bet on him saying yes.”

Patrick let out a breath he was holding. “Okay, cool. Okay.” And then he smiled one of his soft smiles at her. “So do I have your blessing?”

Her eyes widened. “My what?”

“I mean, I could ask his father, I guess, but I don’t think David would appreciate that. Also I don’t think Mr. Rose would be able to keep a secret. And anyway, I feel like you’re the… you’re like the guardian of David’s heart, if that makes sense. So I think you’re the one I should ask.”

The tears became impossible to hold back now. Stevie felt like the play was scraping her raw as it was, exposing a deep well of emotions just below the surface. Grabbing a cocktail napkin, she dabbed at her eyes.

“Stevie, don’t cry, you’re gonna make me cry.”

Laughing, she handed him a cocktail napkin. “You’re such a softy.”

“I know, I know.”

“Yes, you have my blessing. I mean, I basically bullied David into realizing he was into you, so it would be pretty shitty of me not to give you my blessing to marry him.”

Patrick smirked at her. “Yeah, that would be pretty shitty, and you did what now?”

Stevie picked up her beer glass and clinked it against Patrick’s. “I love both you idiots.”

~*~

“Stevie called us idiots,” Patrick mumbled as they were both drifting off to sleep.

“Yeah, her wedding toast left something to be desired, and the fact that I cried anyway just shows how ragged my emotions were today.”

“Not in the toast, I mean when I asked for her blessing to propose, she said ‘I love both you idiots’.”

David pressed his resulting grin against Patrick’s forehead. “That sounds like Stevie.” He squeezed his eyes shut. “I’m so glad my family lost all our money. I’m so glad you couldn’t stay in your hometown anymore and that Ray posted that stupid job online. I’m so glad we made all the right decisions that led us to right here, right now,” David said in a rush, like he had to get the words out before he changed his mind about saying them.

Patrick put his hand over David’s where it rested on his hip and threaded their fingers together, bringing David’s hand to his lips. “Me too, sweetheart.”

END

#david x patrick #david x patrick ff #schitt's creek #schitt's creek ff #my fic

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nobodysuspectsthebutterfly · 6 years

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do I want to do this? do I really want to do this? oh god, I’m doing it.

@gameofthronesrenlyxlorasforever replied to your post “I got a question about Daenerys and Irri...”

GRRM definitely meant the consent between Dany and Irri to be iffy.

Considering GRRM’s words about things like the iffy consent of the book version of the Jaime/Cersei altar sex scene, not to mention the many issues with F&B, I do not believe we have any guaranteed understanding of what GRRM meant regarding the consent in these scenes. Based on the conversation Irri has with Dany, it’s possible that he may consider it fully consensual and not iffy in any way. He hasn’t said, we don’t know. But either way, I was analyzing the actual text, not the author’s intent.

I think it’s super realistic that Dany, that almost anyone, would have a sexual relationship with someone who has a handmaid-type role in her life.

Is it? You think? Although the realism of the relationship wasn’t the question, there are many bedmaids in ASOIAF and other ladies-in-waiting where the relationships are entirely platonic. The example of Princess Rhaena Targaryen and her favorites is somewhat of a notable exception in what has been related so far.

(Also, distinction of terms in ASOIAF: a handmaid or handmaiden is a servant; a bedmaid or lady in waiting or companion is generally nobleborn. Westeros doesn’t appear to have roles like a “gentlewoman of the stool” -- emptying chamberpots is a role for lowborn servants only.)

I haven’t researched this but I’m sure many highborn ladies in the past had sex with their handmaids. They probably didn’t think of it as real sex, though.

If you haven’t researched this, how are you sure? There are rumors and more than rumors about some historical ladies’ companions and favorites (see the recent movie The Favourite for an example), of course, and with the erasure of women’s history and sexuality (and non-het sexuality in particular) it’s hard to be certain, but “many” in the sense of “almost anyone would” is very probably an exaggeration. But they did think of same-sex sexual relationships as “real sex”; not necessarily consequential or always taboo, though.

I think if the consent wasn’t a bit iffy, the situation would feel too saccharine, too unrealistic.

😬 I... um. Um. There are many ways to write realistic and consensual sex scenes that are not saccharine.

Knowing the world she lives in, looking at her own marriage, Dany can’t really have a nuanced concept of consent anyway.

I... um. No. This is not necessarily true. Also it’s not Dany’s concept of consent that’s being considered, it’s the reader’s view of the situation.

I’m not sure if you’re trying to defend Dany here or defend GRRM or what, but it’s irrelevant to the content of my post. Did you read it? Or did you only read the question and then go off on your own mental journey?

Btw, I’m so tired of applying 2019 “woke” attitudes to a work that’s depicting a medieval-type world. It’s ridiculous, being bothered things in a medieval-ish story that people wouldn’t have questioned in the real world until very recently. If Dany was a character in a book that takes place in our world in 2019, that would be a completely different thing. She’s not. The world of ASOIAF is more brutal than ours. Yet, in our world, marital rape wasn’t a question of legality until practically now.

Seriously, I’m as liberal as it gets, but I wouldn’t like these books if the characters had our modern views. It wouldn’t make any sense for any of them to have our ideas about relationships and power dynamics.

ffs.

(a) Fuck moral relativism. I do not give a flying good goddamn whether marital rape was illegal or not in history. It was still rape, whether legally recognized as such or not. Just like slavery was evil and a crime even before it was made illegal. If you disagree with me on this point, you should probably get the fuck off my blog.

(b) This isn’t a discussion of history; this is a discussion of fiction written by a modern author within the past 20 years. ASOIAF is not history. It’s not even our world. It doesn’t exist in a vacuum, it’s a text that was created by a man born in the US in 1948 and whose modern-day views are thoroughly infused in the work as well as his understandings and misunderstandings of history.

(c) The morals and views of consent are ours. The reader’s. Analysis of the text, our concerns about and critiques of the text, are not required to remain solely within the world of the story. We can use the mores of the fictional world to inform our understanding and analysis and critiques, but they are not dependent on them. (for example: Targaryens do not have a problem with incest and understanding that is important to our understanding of character interactions, but if a reader’s mores result in their inability to accept such relationships, that is a perfectly acceptable form of analysis. See also underage relationships, dubious consent, marital rape, slavery, etc. Note also that the reader does not have to necessarily conform to their society’s or their own personal mores, preferring to view fiction as fiction, or choosing to hold inconsistent standards, or whatever they prefer, and those are also perfectly acceptable forms of analysis.)

(d) “I’m as liberal as it gets” and “those SJWs shouldn’t shove their ‘woke’ attitudes into my books!” is um, just a bit of cognitive dissonance, just sayin’.

Again, I don’t know if you’re trying to defend Dany (I think I did a pretty darn good job of it myself) or what, or defend GRRM (nobody was saying he was a bad person for including this plot point) or what. But... seriously. 😒 Seriously.

#gameofthronesrenlyxlorasforever #mfw #seriously mfw when i saw this in my activity #some people #i honestly wouldn't have replied to this but then they went off on 'woke' attitudes and i just graarr #fuck moral relativism #just fuck it #asoiaf #grrm #i really don't want to tag anything else sigh but y'all let me know if you need a warning or whatever please

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collagenopathytango · 2 years

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Growing up with my gay dad not knowing shit about his personal life still having my stepfather be almost a stranger cause dad couldnt get us to bond too often lest it raise suspicion, learning of his sexuality only after I learned about mine because he was so afraid of my reaction despite me being raised to treat gays and lesbians as people, having to obscure and censor my stories of him to erase my stepdad for 7 years, losing contact with him entirely for months after the whole fiasco of his coming out of the closet............... Im bitter towards the internets attitude on being lgbt. I hate the first world attitude about it. Lmao fruity queer.... Shut up. Shut up. You know jack shit about discrimination. Even me being bisexual married to a man have to watch any words I say about my same sex attraction cus my husband's aunt may hear and we cant tell how she'll react and I'm supposed to embrace the beauty of being queer???????? And even THEN I dont have it as bad as my dad whose legal marriage of years to his husband was not recognised as a family unit when he came to visit ... :))))) I hate pride month so much I hate queer culture I hate being "loud and proud" stop making it cool to seem like being same sex attracted is inherently alien FFS I am so sorry for my dad it makes me want to actually cry

#vent #pride month is just endless suffering to me

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ellanainthetardis · 7 years

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A much needed discussion in the Snow’s aftermarth today! I hope you like it! Please, let me know!

[ff] or [ao3]

Chapter 37 : The Worst Word

The roof was the same and yet something felt off.

Everything felt off, really.

He had lasted five minutes in the penthouse, time enough to check that the bar cart was still liquor free. The familiarity of the place felt displaced. The same but different. Difficult to explain, impossible to apprehend and fucking terrifying.

His heart was still missing a beat now and then before racing to catch up, consequence of Snow’s visit. It might have been easier if Peeta hadn’t remained locked in his room. Maybe. He wasn’t sure. Being confronted to the boy and his failed broken promise didn’t do anything for him but knowing the boy was in pain because of him…

His train of thoughts came to a stop when the door opened and he looked up from where he was sitting with his back against the low wall. Effie’s face was a blank mask of content happiness that he knew better than to believe, he looked away before she could make eye contact, fighting against a new wave of shame.

Snow might as well have cut his balls and made him eat them in front of her.

Fucking bruised pride.

It should have been the last of his worries but going head to head with the President had made him annoyingly clear-headed.

“How are you?” she asked, glancing over the wall at the Capitol beneath. He didn’t know how he felt about the surrounding noises of cars engines, horns, people talking, walking, breathing… On one hand, it was an aggression. On the other, it drowned his thoughts and that wasn’t a bad thing.

“Peachy.” he muttered, bumping his head against the wall once, as if to better convince himself.

“Haymitch.” she rebuked. A reminder that they were alone and he didn’t need to pretend, he figured.

He closed his eyes, forcing a fake levity to his voice. “Like I was tossed in a locked room with a bunch of friends I was forced to murder?”

It fell flat. So flat.

He swallowed hard, not looking when she lowered herself to the ground next to him in a puff of pink fabric. He felt her hand on his arm, light, and he made a conscious effort not to flinch or shrug it off. He felt wary of people violating his personal space. He felt… On edge. And he wanted a weapon, his weapon but the thought of asking for the knife that had killed Chaff…

He let out a small sigh. “You know, sweetheart, I can’t believe you didn’t make sure the bar would be stocked. Expected better of you.”

It wasn’t exactly a joke, more of a warning. He wasn’t remaining sober. Not if he could help it.

She snorted, a touch bitter but not quite surprised. “I need you sharp a little while longer.”

“I guess.” he sighed again. He felt her wriggle next to him and he opened his eyes to see her pull out a battered cigarette packet and a lighter from very well hidden pockets. The lighter wasn’t the silver one Finnick had gifted her with but a cheap plastic white one branded with the logo of a popular club downtown. He didn’t ask why the change. He could guess. He snatched a cigarette from the packet without waiting to be offered. If he couldn’t drink, he would take what he could get. “How many of those did you smoke while I was gone?”

She let out a chuckle and lit his cigarette before doing the same for the one she had wedged between her red painted lips. She took a drag and blew out the smoke slowly before giving him a small shrug. “Enough that we can stop pretending it is simply stress-smoking, I suppose.” She waved the lighter dismissively. “I will quit again. Eventually.”

He breathed in the smell of cigarette, letting it invade everything. It was better than imagining coal dust or remembering pure outdoor air. The city might be just what he needed after all. Polluted air that nobody would have accused of being fresh… No risk of confusing his surroundings for an arena.

He stared at the red glow of the cigarette as it consumed itself between his quivering fingers.

“How’s the boy doing?” he asked after a few minutes.

She took her sweet time answering that, debating what to say and what to keep silent to spare his feelings.

“Right now, he is upset.” she said slowly. “He had not realized… He never thought you would not want to go back to Twelve. I do not think he truly thought about the… nature of the arena.”

“Did you?” he retorted. It surprised him a little that she seemed to have grasped the problem before he had even voiced it. But, then again, it wasn’t her first rodeo either.

“As soon as they unveiled it.” she confessed, taking a nervous drag. Her fingers weren’t that steady either. “I heard through the grapevine this particular arena was a last minute decision. It was in the work somewhere, of course, it takes years to build them as you know, but… They had another one in mind for the Quell until a few months ago. Perhaps there were some malfunctions…”

“Sure.” he scoffed. “Malfunctions.” Or the possibility that Heavensbee had babbled about it to the rebels – or to some victors. “Sent a clear message though, yeah?”

“Rather, yes. For those of us who knew how to read between the lines, at least. And I suppose the Districts saw it clearly for what it was too.” she admitted. “This Quell was a hit. The ratings have never been higher.”

“Awesome.” he deadpanned, flicking ashes away. “I’m guessing I wasn’t the popular choice, though.”

“You would be mistaken, then.” she countered carefully. “Cashmere was the clear favorite on the betting boards but… After Katniss… People were rooting for you.”

It made it worse somehow.

“How much do they want a piece of our asses?” Those were important questions, he told himself. Those were the questions he would need the answers to if he wanted to play the game. The red glow of the cigarette was coming dangerously close to his skin but he brought it to his lips anyway, not quite sure if he wanted to get burned or if he was desperate for the reassuring pattern smoking involved: bring it to his mouth, breathe in, take it away, breathe out, flick ash, repeat. No room for intrusive memories.

Effie crushed the bud of her own cigarette against the ground and then tossed it away. “For now, Peeta is safe because of Katniss but I would advise on sending him back to Twelve as soon as possible. He is grieving, we can use that excuse.”

He nodded once to show his approbation of this plan. Sending the boy away would solve more than one problem. He wouldn’t have to face his failure every day for starter. “And us?”

They had been lucky the previous year because anyone with common sense had put two and two together, had realized it equaled poisonous berries and hadn’t really tried to grab anyone from the winning team. They wouldn’t be that lucky this time around, he suspected. Effie would be the escort of the season and he was the current victor. They were both attractive enough. The conclusion wasn’t a leap.

“I won’t be an escort much longer. I can navigate through that.” she hummed. “You… Well, victors your age are usually solicited for the whole package. They want the pretence of a romance not just sex… If we came out… It would go a long way into removing both of us from the playing field.”

Her voice was tentative. It wasn’t difficult to understand why. He had never reacted well to any mention of their relationship before the morning of the Quell’s Reaping, before he had thought… She was wary and she had reasons to be, he figured.

“We need to go public.” he stated, crushing the bud of his cigarette under his boot. “Snow’s counting on it now.”

She frowned. “I fail to see…”

“Oh, come on, Princess.” he scowled. “A victor and an escort falling in love? It shows the Districts you’re not all that bad, that there’s good there… Why do you think he was so ready to let me stay?” Besides the fact it was smarter to keep Haymitch close where he could watch him. He shook his head. “Never mind me being in love with an escort. I fucking won two Quells. I’m the fucking Districts' champion.”

All that talk of being in love made something flash on her face, something like awe and longing, but it was gone under a well crafted mask of blankness before he could try to analyze it.

“He was very clear about our marriage being…” she argued.

“Yeah, let’s never talk about what happened earlier ever again, okay?” he cut her off, getting to his feet with less grace than he would have liked. He paced the length of the roof, wrapping his good arm around his aching chest. “Marriage is something else. It’s too much. It sets a precedent he doesn’t want. I don’t have the same rights you do. I’m a victor, yeah, but legally that’s still a far shot from a Capitol citizen. Being together is one thing… Good for country unity… Advertising us as equal… Totally another, Princess.”

He paced back and forth. From the edge of the roof to the door. Again and again, finding some comfort in the repetitive pattern. Wasn’t that the first sign of insanity or something?

“It is more than I ever expected.” she whispered.

He kept on pacing, licking his lips.

It was more than he had ever expected too. They had gone from the best they could get being a few weeks a year to the possibility of a life together.

He thought it was a trap, a life insurance.

Because once he got that life, they would have to pry it away from his cold dead hands.

“You can still back out.” he offered.

He couldn’t do any of it alone, that much was clear to him, but he wouldn’t condemn her to share his prison. She could come willingly or…

“Are you moving in with me or are you staying in the penthouse?” she asked, as if she hadn’t heard him at all. “Nobody said you had to stay in the penthouse and if we do come out as a couple, there is no reason to expect you wouldn’t live with me. Brutus was renting a flat when he spent months in the city… It isn’t unprecedented for a victor not to reside at the Center. We should be living together, I think. We have been sleeping together for so long… I am ready for the next step. Aren’t you?”

She sounded so serious, it stopped his frantic pacing. He stood there, one arm around his chest, the other hanging limply by his side, watching the small crease between her eyebrows that meant she was deep in thought.

“My apartment is big enough, I suppose… Although perhaps we should look for something a little roomier in time. There are darling houses on the market near Main Square…” she hummed. “My father might even own a few, who knows… He is always buying and selling properties… I shall ask. And…”

“Snow threatened to kill you and you want to go house hunting?” he spat, cutting her off. She looked up at him, startled by the words.

“I thought we just agreed to never talk about it again?” she winced. She fished another cigarette and lit it, betraying just how unsettled on the issue she really was.

Haymitch’s hands were shaking badly and he bundled the one she could see in a fist.

“He wants to kill you. Because of me.” he growled. “Because I…”

His voice trailed off.

“Because you love me.” she supplied calmly. The only tell of nervousness was her trembling fingers when she brought the cigarette to her lips. “It had nothing to do with what happened before the Quell, you realize. Everyone in the business knows we are lovers. It was only a matter of time… It is as much my fault as yours.”

“He was going to kill you…” he said again and it sounded almost pleading. He didn’t know what he was begging her for. Common sense? For her to run and not look back because he would end up getting her murdered and it was more than he could bear? “He was going to…”

“You stopped him.” she said softly.

His cheeks flushed crimson with embarrassment and he turned away from her, walked straight to the wall and rested his elbows on the edge, wondering what it would be like to fall down, to… He closed his eyes. Not like it was even a possibility with the force field in place…

The mix of tobacco and perfume reached his nose before he felt her presence at his back. He flinched when she placed her hand on his shoulder and he wondered if that instinctive reaction would ever stop, tried to remember when it had stopped last time…

“You do not want to talk about earlier because you thought it was weak, that you were weak…” she whispered and he bodily shuddered in mortification. Give him a good lashing on a public square every day rather than this. At least he could still somehow get out of it with his dignity intact, with… She pressed herself against his back, not hard enough that he felt trapped, just enough that he could feel her warmth… “I thought I never saw you stronger.” He scoffed at that but she didn’t let herself be distracted. “What you did… What he made you do… It was meant to be humiliating and I understand why you feel that way, I do… But Haymitch… How can I find it anything but strong when you accepted it for me? When you went through that for me?”

He took a few deep breaths, doubting he would ever see it that way.

“Seems like I do a lot of stupid shit for you.” he muttered.

And that wasn’t him. He wasn’t the fool who did stuff out of love. He wasn’t the hero in those romance stories she liked so much who ended up defying the odds just so he could get the hot smut scene at the end of the book. He wasn’t the guy who risked it all for the girl. Was he?

“I really wanted Katniss to win.” he said just to hear it out loud, just to remind them that this hadn’t been the plan and that no part of them, none at all, should be happy at the perspective of being granted a life together. It wasn’t right.

“We all did, darling.” she promised. She leaned a little more against him, seeking comfort maybe. “We couldn’t do anything… When it happened… We knew what Johanna was planning and we couldn’t do anything… There was some money left and Peeta kept telling me we should send something, find a way to warn you, but I knew… I knew it would be too late. I knew by the time we contacted the Gamemakers and requested a parachute… I knew we had lost. It was one of those times, you know?”

“Yeah.” he sighed.

After a few Games… There were patterns. Victors with a sound brain and a few of the escorts eventually became experts in the art of predicting what would happen in which time frame. And, he figured, everyone who had been involved in the Games for long enough knew those moments when they came: the moment of clarity when you realized that, as a mentor, as someone sitting outside the arena, you were powerless to help the tribute about to meet his death on the screen. And there was nothing but grim acceptance in those moments because there was nothing else to do but watch and admit that you had lost.

“Johanna pushed the tree, it went down, Katniss screamed, you tried to step aside…” she whispered. “It is all so clear in my mind… I couldn’t watch the live feed, I could only stare at your monitor, at your heartbeat, at…” She took a deep breath. “You didn’t die and my heart soared and then… Then I realized Peeta had gone white, I realized Katniss’ monitor had shut down…” She shook her head. “I didn’t even reach for him. I couldn’t. You attacked Johanna and…”

“And I beat her to death?” he finished, feeling sick to the stomach at the memories her words were bringing back. He didn’t want to face those memories. He didn’t want to think about… He glanced down at his right hand, not surprised to see a fist but surprised that it was free of blood. Not even a scratch on his knuckles. The doctors had seen to that.

Effie sneaked an arm around his waist, buried her face between his shoulder blades. “I have never been as grateful to Chaff as I was when he came for you. I… I feel so sorry for all I said to him, about him, all those years…”

“Chaff was an idiot.” he snapped, pain and anger mixing in his voice. He wanted to shrug her off and storm out, away, but he was rooted to the spot. It was a curious paradox: the need to be alone to lick his wounds battling with the desperate craving he felt for her. He bowed, letting his shoulders slouch under the weight of it all. “He rigged it, you know. He let me win. Idiot. Fucking idiot…” He shook his head, unable to keep the edge off his voice, unable to bear it even as her arm tightened around him as if to anchor him. “What did he do it for? He had a sister, people… Why would he go and…”

His voice broke and he left that sentence unfinished.

It was a long time before she ventured a guess, sounding far too knowing for someone who had never seen eye to eye with his best friend. “He knew he was dying.”

“Bullshit.” he snarled. “All he had to do was win. They’d have fixed him. The fuck did he have to go and make me win for?”

She was very careful when she spoke next. “Has it occurred to you… What Katniss was to you, what Finnick was to Mags… Has it occurred to you that you were that to Chaff?”

“Don’t be stupid.” he sneered.

“Am I being stupid?” she hummed. “He was your mentor, wasn’t he? Perhaps not officially but… You told me enough times that you felt you owed him. He was very protective of you… Why, I lost count of all the lectures he gave me.”

“Lectures?” he frowned.

“He thought I would break your heart.” she sighed. “Either by ending up dead or by leaving you. I never wanted to listen.”

He snorted because he could perfectly imagine it. Chaff trying to threaten her into being sensible…

“Never did either.” he admitted, covering her hand with his. And he couldn’t say he regretted it. Not really. He rubbed his face with his free hand. “I’m tired.”

“You should rest, take a nap.” she suggested gently. “Mr Harwyn and Maya are coming to dinner tonight. It will be nice to have the whole team together before the Crowning, won’t it?”

“Almost the whole team.” he corrected absent-mindedly.

“Yes.” she lamented. “Almost.”

Almost was the worst word that ever was, he decided.

#hayffie #effie trinket #haymitch abernathy #into that good night

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dreamerandthedarkhalf · 4 years

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FFS DO BETTER/BE BETTER

I am Asexual. I don't experience sexual attraction. I am part of the QUILTBAG population (Queer/Questioning, Intersex, Lesbian, Transgender, Bisexual, Asexual/Agender/Aromantic, Gay). My dad supports the current administration. So do several people who would have called me "friend" at some point in their/our lives. I have tried to listen. I don't name call. I try to do research and provide facts. I try to sound reasonable. I try not to be individually hurt by the knowledge that people I care about don't care about me. I honestly don't know what to do. I love my dad, I really do, but I don't know how to express how terrified I am about this week. I don't know how to show how much worse things have gotten. How come everything I say is immediately discredited because it's assumed it came from "liberal news media" and is assumed to come from "anonymous sources" which won't tell the truth? How come that kind of scrutiny and "fact checking" is necessary for the information I see, but NOT for the information presented elsewhere? How come you don't spend that much focus looking at the personal debt and taxation status of someone else? How come you're okay with stripping away my right to get married in the future or adopt kids or even buy a fucking house? How come you don't understand that non-Christian religious folks DO NOT have the same religious freedoms as Christians? Because I like to bury my emotions with knowledge and research, here is some information about queer youth homelessness and suicides, just to give you a background on how society treats queer folks. The lowest estimate I could find shows that 22% of the homeless youth population are queer. Some say 40%. Some say 62%. Those are not small numbers. The LOWEST I could find is 22%. The number of queer teenage suicides is also depressingly high and the number of queer teenagers who attempted suicide DRASTICALLY REDUCED with the legalization of same-sex marriage. "By contrast, the passage of laws that recognize LGBT people as equal with regard to civil rights may have significant positive impacts on the physical and mental health and well-being of LGBT youth; for example, a study of nationwide data from across the United States from January 1999 to December 2015 revealed that the establishment of same-sex marriage is associated with a significant reduction in the rate of attempted suicide among children, with the effect being concentrated among children of a minority sexual orientation (LGBT youth), resulting in approximately 134,000 fewer children attempting suicide each year in the United States." Is it really so hard for you to grant people not like you the same rights you enjoy as easily as breathing? FFS. We have to do better than this. We have to treat each other better. We have to stop being so f^cking selfish. Respect other people. Wish people happy holidays. Don't get offended when they don't say "Merry Christmas". Don't take away other people's rights to get married or adopt children or choose what happens to their own bodies. WE HAVE TO DO BETTER. https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/.../lgbt.../ https://www.newportacademy.com/.../lgbt-suicide-statistics/ https://brandongaille.com/21-homeless-lgbt-youth-statistics/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_among_LGBT_youth https://www.healthyplace.com/.../homosexuality-and...

#personal

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bluewatsons · 5 years

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Fredrik Svenaeus, To die well: the phenomenology of suffering and end of life ethics, Med Health Care & Philos 1 (forthcoming, 2019)

Abstract

The paper presents an account of suffering as a multi-level phenomenon based on concepts such as mood, being-in-the-world and core life value. This phenomenological account will better allow us to evaluate the hardships associated with dying and thereby assist health care professionals in helping persons to die in the best possible manner. Suffering consists not only in physical pain but in being unable to do basic things that are considered to bestow meaning on one’s life. The suffering can also be related to no longer being able to be the person one wants to be in the eyes of others, to losing one’s dignity and identity. These three types of suffering become articulated by a narrative that holds together and bestows meaning on the whole life and identity of the dying person. In the encounter with the patient, the health-care professional attempts to understand the suffering-experience of the patient in an empathic and dialogic manner, in addition to exploring what has gone wrong in the patient’s body. Matters of physician assisted suicide and/or euthanasia—if it should be legalized and if so under which conditions—need to be addressed by understanding the different levels of human suffering and its positive counterpart, human flourishing, rather than stressing the respect for patient autonomy and no-harm principles, only. In this phenomenological analysis the notions of vulnerability and togetherness, ultimately connecting to the political-philosophical issues of how we live together and take care of each other in a community, need to be scrutinized.

Introduction

Questions of physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia are complicated, not only because they involve a health care professional doing something that is apparently opposite to what she is normally supposed to do, namely helping to kill or killing which stands in contrast to curing diseases and saving lives. These questions are complicated because it can sometimes be very hard to judge whether a life situation is truly hopeless and undignified—meaning there is nothing that can be done about the severe suffering—or whether there are still solutions to be found that would lead to a life worth living for the person who wants to die. Despite the progresses in palliative care, there still seem to be some cases in which pain relieving therapies do not work to a sufficient degree, thus leaving the patient in intolerable pain. Even trickier, though, are the cases in which the perceived intolerable suffering consists not in physical pain but in being unable to do basic things that are considered to bestow meaning on one’s life—like having a good meal, going for a walk, reading the newspaper, or joining in a discussion with friends. The suffering can also be related to no longer being able to be the person one wants to be in the eyes of others, to losing one’s dignity and identity. Such fundamental values become articulated by a narrative that holds together and bestows meaning on the whole life and identity of the person in question. In this paper, I will develop a phenomenological account of suffering based on concepts such as mood, being-in-the-world and core life value that, I will argue, better allows us to understand and evaluate the hardships associated with dying and there through may assist health care professionals in helping persons to die in the best possible manner. A phenomenological account of suffering proceeds from the first-person perspective of the patient, rather than the third- (or, rather, non-) person perspective of medical science. In the encounter with the patient, the health-care professional attempts to understand the first-person suffering-experience of the patient in an empathic and dialogic manner (or, at least, he or she should do so), in addition to exploring what has gone wrong in the patient’s body (Svenaeus 2000, part 3). I will claim that the combination of caring and empathic listening with adequate medical investigations and therapies is arguably the best way to help suffering, dying persons.

What matters in human life to persons and the phenomenology of suffering

In his celebrated book Being Mortal: Illness, Medicine, and What Matters in the End Atul Gawande writes:

People with serious illness have priorities besides simply prolonging their lives. Surveys find that their top concerns include avoiding suffering, strengthening relationships with family and friends, being mentally aware, not being a burden on others, and achieving a sense that their life is complete. Our system of technological medical care has utterly failed to meet these needs, and the cost of this failure is measured in far more than dollars. The question therefore is not how we can afford this system’s expense. It is how we can build a health care system that will actually help people achieve what’s most important to them at the end of their lives. (Gawande 2014, p. 155)

Reading through Gawande’s well researched book and also taking into account other studies of what matters in the end of life and what type of situations can lead patients to express a wish to die (Müller-Busch 2015), we end up with a list like this:

Intolerable pain. Not being able to breathe. Constant nausea. Leaking urine and faeces. Not being able to do basic things, such as eating, going to the toilet, reading, and moving around. Becoming dependent upon or a burden to close others. Not having a place and purpose in the world any more. Losing one’s memory and sanity. No longer being in control. Losing one’s dignity.

What are these painful experiences about? What do they consist in? I would like to propose that, from a phenomenological point of view, they could all be viewed as different moods of suffering involving different levels of what the phenomenologist refers to as a being-in-the-world:

Suffering is an alienating mood overcoming a person and engaging her in an embodied struggle to remain at home in the face of the loss of meaning and purpose in life. It involves painful experiences at different levels that are connected through the suffering-mood but are nevertheless distinguishable by being primarily about (1) my embodiment, (2) my engagements in the world together with others, and (3) my core life values. (Svenaeus 2014, p. 413)

That feelings—I am using this term in an all-encompassing sense—in the form of moods are not only bodily sensations but, more importantly, make for meaningfulness by opening up a life world of objects, actions, thoughts, communication, and so on, is a thematic developed by phenomenologists such as Max Scheler, Martin Heidegger, and Jean-Paul Sartre (Freeman 2014; Solomon 2006). Different things show up in the life world because of the mood a person is in, and they do so through a certain background meaning structure, often referred to by phenomenologists as the person’s being-in-the-world. Human animals have a much richer world than other animals because the things that show up to them through moods are interwoven in patterns of meaning that have developed into what we might call a culture: a system of human-made significance that is articulated and communicated in and through a language.

Why are the phenomenological issues of mood and being-in-the-world important from the perspective of suffering and end of life ethics? Because they provide clues for understanding how physical suffering is connected to the other types of suffering which feature in the list of what may lead persons to express a wish to die: frustrated life plans and broken narratives. Many other things than physical pains can make a person suffer: to not get what you want, to get what you really do not want, to not become who you want to be, or to become who you really do not want to be, for instance. Wishes and strivings for certain goals in life are surely also forms of feelings, but as emotions they include, in contrast to pain, specific thoughts. They are ways of presenting not only the whole world but also specific states of the world as what is to be desired by the person who has them (Goldie 2000). The thoughts in question can be more or less conscious to the person having the emotions. The ways we live and embody ideals and values in life are not always very well reflected but rather subconscious. Having said this, how are we to think about a “life plan”, or a “life narrative”, and the way they can be frustrated for a person? How explicit are the goals we set for ourselves in our lives?

The most intriguing part of the phenomenology of suffering is perhaps the way a person’s suffering is both determined and potentially changeable by way of the core life values she embodies. What does this mean? If I am a concert pianist, the sudden painful inability to move my little finger is much more important to me than if I am a librarian. In the same way, finding out that my wife has been having an affair is much more devastating if I believe in life-long faithful marriages than if I believe that the ideal of monogamy is a destructive illusion. The moods we live in embody such life priorities and evaluations by the way they make things in our life appear as more or less significant to us. Charles Taylor, in Sources of the Self, analyses the way our personal beings, are built up by way of such evaluations. Most important are those priorities he calls “strong evaluations”, evaluations about the things that makes a human life worth living beyond satisfying the basic needs of food, drink, sleep, safety, love and sex (Taylor 1989, 4 ff). The moral philosopher Ronald Dworkin calls the same things “critical interests” ( 1994, 199 ff). These strong evaluations concern moral matters: what responsibilities I have for the life and flourishing of other persons. They also, however, concern questions about what a good life means for me and how I attain self-respect in the eyes of others:

To understand our moral world we have to see not only what ideas and pictures underlie our sense of respect for others but also those which underpin our notion of a full life. And as we shall see, these are not two quite separate orders of ideas. There is a substantial overlap or, rather, a complex relation in which some of the basic notions reappear in a new way. This is particularly the case for what I called above the affirmation of ordinary life. In general, one might try to single out three axes of what can be called, in the most general sense, moral thinking. As well as the two just mentioned—our sense of respect for and obligations to others, and our understandings of what makes a full life—there is also the range of notions concerned with dignity. By this I mean the characteristics by which we think of ourselves as commanding (or failing to command) the respect of those around us. (Taylor 1989, pp. 14–15)

In tracking the origins of the modern concept and experience of selfhood, Taylor, in addition to this preliminary outline of the territory of strong evaluations, spends considerable time articulating the importance of self-expression for our ways of being constituted as persons (selves) in the modern era. Protestantism and romanticism are his major sources in stressing the importance of spelling oneself out by way of a form of creative work (Taylor 1989, p. 374). The artist, the genius of the Romantic era, creating her works of art and herself by making her inner nature visible to us in the form of a painting or a poem, is exemplary in this regard. From this image it is not a very long leap to a model of the self—the person—as constituted by a life narrative, a model we find in contemporary cultural theory and medical ethics (Schechtman 1996). Taylor’s strong-evaluation idea about what essentially matters to us in life and how we may flourish is also consonant with research in developmental psychology about how we attain a sense and concept of selfhood together with and in the eyes of others (Rochat 2009, 86 ff). Our feelings of who we are and what matters to us in life are to a very large extent dependent on the way we connect to others and their views on us. The story of a human life is from the very beginning a narrative that attains meaning for a person in the eyes of others.

The idea that a person (a self) is a narrative obviously has to be interpreted in some metaphorical way to make sense (see many of the essays in Gallagher 2011). Human lives are not stories, written or told, in the strict sense of the word. The life of a person, however, clearly has a temporal structure by including a beginning and an end, and also a cohering structure in the way that the life must make, at least minimal, sense to the person in question and to others attempting to understand her. When we strive to understand life events involving persons we turn to stories. The narrative structure is where the cohesiveness of a human life comes from: it is not enough to have temporal continuity; one also needs to develop a narrative to explore and to show who one is (Goldie 2012; Ricoeur 1992). The question of personal identity in this extended sense is connected to the core life values we identify with. The most important values as regards self-identity are the ones Taylor identifies as demanding strong interpretation: values regarding the treatment of others; values regarding the content of a good life; and values regarding the identification of oneself as someone worthy of respect in the eyes of others (Taylor 1989; see also Taylor 1991). These three zones of core life values are interconnected, and they demand, at least to some extent, self-reflection. But core life-narrative values do not come about only through philosophical reflection; they become embodied by living in the world and sharing it with others from the very start. Strong evaluations are always dependent upon a life form, a horizon of attuned understanding that one has grown into through the support and influence of others and they can thus be more or less implicit or explicit for a person. Core life values are, nevertheless, always core life-narrative values, because they are only possible to comprehend and/or formulate by way of stories about a person’s life (Goldie 2012, Chapter 6). A human life is not a narrative but rather it is imbued with reason and coherence through stories that can be more or less true to the life of the person they are about (Goldie 2012, Chapter 7).

The case of Ivan Ilyich

In order to exemplify and concretise the phenomenological argument about suffering, let us now turn to the short story about Ivan Ilyich, often used to discuss issues surrounding dying and suffering in medical ethics (Tolstoy 2015). Ivan is a fairly successful lawyer living a seemingly happy life with his family and friends in Saint Petersburg when illness, probably some sort of intestinal cancer, hits him:

The pain in his side oppressed him, and seemed to be constantly getting worse; it became a continuous pain, and the taste in his mouth became stranger and stranger. It seemed to him that his breath smelt disgusting, and his appetite got worse and he felt weaker all the time. He could not deceive himself: something new and terrible was happening to him, something so important that nothing that had ever happened to him in his life had been more important. And he was the only one who knew; those around him didn’t understand, or didn’t want to understand, and they all thought that everything was going on as before. That was what tormented Ivan Ilyich more than anything. His family—above all, his wife and daughter, who were in a positive whirl of engagements—understood nothing, as he could see; they were vexed that he was so morose and demanding, as if it was his fault. They tried to hide it, but he could see that they found him a nuisance. (Tolstoy 2015, p. 181)

The doctors of this time—the 1880s—were not able to do much about cancer, especially not if it had metastasized, but the worst thing for Ivan is not that he suspects the doctors do not have a clue about what causes his abdominal pain (a virtual line-up of famous and expensive physicians are consulted as his condition deteriorates). The worst thing is that they, just like his family and friends, neither see nor understand him and his suffering:

The doctor said: such-and-such and so-and-so indicate that within your body you have such-and-such and so-and-so; but if the investigations of such-and-such and so-and-so fail to confirm this, then we still have to conclude the presence of such-and-such and so-and-so instead. But if we suppose such-and-such, then, etc. Ivan Ilyich was only interested in one thing: was his condition dangerous or not? But the doctor ignored this improper question. From the doctor’s point of view, such a question was pointless and could not be discussed; the only thing that mattered was to weigh up alternative probabilities – a wandering kidney and a disorder of the blind gut… From the doctor’s summing up, Ivan Ilyich came to the conclusion that things were bad; that the doctor didn’t care, and probably nobody else did either, but for him they were bad. And this conclusion struck Ivan Ilyich painfully, making him feel very sorry for himself and angry with this doctor who was so indifferent to a matter of such importance. But he said nothing. He stood up, laid his money on the table, and sighed. (Tolstoy 2015, p. 178)

The medical-scientific abilities and skills involved in understanding such-and-such and so-and-so have advanced immensely since the times of Ivan Ilyich, but despite this, many patients and physicians testify that the tendency to neglect the suffering and dying person for all his diseases is still in place (Bishop 2011; Cassell 2004; Gawande 2014). This is so for several reasons: the dominance of the scientific perspective in contemporary medicine; the tendency to divide the investigation and treatment of a patient between different medical specialities and professionals; the unwillingness to address matters concerning impendent death in a discussion with the patient because this will involve anguish and terror; and finally the wish to focus on keeping the patient alive, since for many physicians death is the ultimate disaster and failure to be avoided.

Doctors are supposed to save lives, not end them, but in some situations they are faced with the choice of treating a disease that is killing the patient or attempting to mitigate his suffering. Currently, in such cases, when further treatment of the disease will only prolong life marginally and it will actually mean increased suffering for the patient, the recommendation by experts is increasingly to focus on palliation rather than fighting disease. Patients have the right to choose between various options that doctors judge to be medically feasible and advisable, but before presenting such choices the professionals should take care to empathically understand the suffering persons they are facing and what their main issues are (Gawande 2014). The heroic imperative of “doing everything possible” in all situations, and putting one’s faith in a medical science that will soon be able to treat every disease, has vanished as it has become obvious that, in some situations, advanced treatment possibilities and technologies can intensify and prolong a patient’s suffering rather than the other way around.

Doctors have become incomparably more successful in mitigating the kind of bodily pains that Ivan Ilyich suffers from in the novel, not least the pain he endures the last three terrible days of his life:

It was from that moment that the screaming began, which was to continue uninterrupted for three days, a screaming so dreadful that even through two closed doors it was impossible to hear it without horror. In that moment when he answered his wife, he realized that he was lost, there was no return, the end had come, the end of everything, and yet his doubt had still not been resolved, it still remained a doubt. “O! O! O!” he screamed in different intonations. He had begun by crying “No!”, and so went on, continuing with the sound “o”. (Tolstoy 2015, p. 207)

Are contemporary doctors also better at understanding the core life-narrative values of their patients than Ivan’s doctors (as well as family members and friends) were? Not necessarily; the skills of empathy, dialogue, and narrative understanding have not been focused upon in modern medicine until fairly recently, and in many settings they remain more or less absent, overshadowed by the focus upon medical science and diseases of the body. To some extent, the medical-scientific successes of the last century have even ignored “the art of medicine’, a tradition which some doctors in the times of Ivan Ilyich knew and practiced (not the ones he encountered, though) (Svenaeus 2000, part 1).

Palliative care, physician assisted suicide and euthanasia

Palliative care is a speciality that is increasingly focused upon in modern medicine, and we can hope that doctors will become even better at treating the pains we often suffer towards the end of our lives. However, as I have tried to argue above, suffering is not only about physical pain but also about what we are able to do in the world and who we are able to be there in the company of others. Physicians like Jeffrey Bishop, Eric Cassell and Atul Gawande all stress these additional suffering domains in their attempts to understand the pains and hardships of dying persons (Bishop 2011; Cassell 2004; Gawande 2014). Human life is a “being-towards-death’, as Heidegger puts it in Being and Time, and this means that death is not only a physiological event at the end of our life but a relationship to our own ending that we potentially face all the time (Aho 2016; Carel 2008; Heidegger 1996, 235 ff). The meaning of my life narrative and the core life values I more or less consciously embody are inseparable from the beginning and end of my life. A story always has a beginning and an ending; this is part of what makes it a story with a certain plot. And a miserable ending, at least if it is a long and disruptive one, can change the meaning of the whole life story if a person becomes severely alienated concerning the ways she lives and looks upon herself in the more or less imagined eyes of others (Dworkin 1994, 199 ff).

When we become old our bodies inevitably display a vulnerability we have actually been suffering from ever since we were born (MacIntyre 2001). Human bodies are weak and rather defenceless ever from the start in being susceptible to countless forms of injuries and diseases. “Transhumanists” dream of an age when we will no longer have to die, because doctors and other scientists will be able to fix or replace our ageing body (parts) (O’Connell 2017). However, for a foreseeable future we will have to live with our vulnerable condition, which means that ageing inevitably comes with more illness suffering and the kinds of alienation that follow in its track. We adapt to this increasingly vulnerable and weak condition with the more or less spontaneous change of lifestyle that often commences in growing old. Old people live slower and more cautious lives; they become less focused upon doing new things and treasure relationships with people they already know. To become older means embodying a life narrative that is coming to a close, and this is not necessarily a bad or sad thing.

In using the expression “embodying a life narrative” I literally mean a person’s lived embodiment as the central aspect and way of existing in a life world. Ways of embodiment change with age, and this is also the reason persons modulate or change the preferred life projects from which they derive their core life-narrative values. We generally become less physically active and more thoughtful as we grow older; we often care less about our shortcomings and appreciate the things we are still able to do. In this manner we can escape alienation and even become more at home with ourselves in getting closer to the end of our life. But in some cases, the changes brought on us by diseases and other sad life events are possibly too severe or tragic to allow for changed life priorities. We feel the suffering is too much to bear and live with, and we would rather die than survive in this condition and situation if nothing can be done about it.

If faced by the choice of either living the last 3 days of our lives as Ivan Ilyich did or receiving a lethal injection at the beginning of day one that would kill us painlessly, arguably a vast majority would choose the latter. But doctors are better at treating pain today than they were in the 1880s, and many argue that we do not need the option of the lethal injection to live tolerable and dignified lives to our very end. This is probably so in most cases, but there still seem to be some cases in which palliation does not work to a sufficient degree, thus leaving the patient in intolerable pain (Müller-Busch 2015, p. 185). Even trickier, though, are the cases in which the perceived intolerable suffering consists not in physical pain but in being unable to do what is seen as the things that bestow meaning on one’s life (Müller-Busch 2015, p. 185). Is it always possible to adapt by changing one’s fundamental goals in life, or are some changes beyond what is reasonable to expect, especially in consideration of persons who will soon die and do not have much time in which to realize their changed life priorities? Clinical empathy and medical hermeneutics demand an attempt to understand the whole life situation and identity of the patient, especially in cases of severe, chronic, and terminal suffering. What does the patient’s life look like and what makes it worth or not worth living? What does he fear the most and why is this the case? Only through empathically asking such questions and interpreting the responses can doctors help patients to die well in end-of-life care (Gawande 2014, Chapters 7 and 8).

The many ways persons suffer in end of life care surveyed above provide arguments for allowing physician assisted suicide and/or euthanasia (PAS/E) by law, as has happened in a numberof Western countries during the last 25 years (the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxemburg, some states in the United States, and Canada) (Birnbacher and Dahl 2008; Cholbi and Varelius 2015). These sufferings, as we have seen, do not only concern bodily ailments but also cherished activities and core life values. Such life values become articulated by a narrative that holds together and bestows meaning on the whole life and identity of the person in question (Baker 2000; Ricoeur 1992; Schechtman 1996). If, in view of a chronic medical condition that plagues her and will soon lead to her inevitable death, a person finds her current situation incompatible with being the kind of person she has become and wants to be in and through her life narrative, this is a very strong argument for allowing her to die (Dworkin 1994, pp. 235–236).

Such cases could also include situations of advance directives, as they are called, in which persons have stated that they do not want to be kept alive by means of feeding tubes or ventilators should they end up severely demented or enter a vegetative state. However, allowing someone to die is not the same thing as assisting a person in taking her life, much less killing her; if the latter two actions are to be allowed we minimally need the person to be able to asses her present condition in a realistic way and ask for this help. If such conditions are fulfilled, the phenomenological perspective on personhood and suffering in medicine, in my view, does not rule out that some measures taken to mitigate or avoid severe suffering for a patient may include at least assisting him in taking his life. But how should such a moral conclusion reached by way of paying attention to the potential sufferings of dying persons be cached out regarding the implementation of guidelines and laws regulating what dying patients have the right to ask for and health care personnel assisting them have the right to do? This is the complicated question to which I now turn.

Vulnerable suffering persons and existential politics

Matters of PAS/E—if it should be legalized and if so under which conditions—need to be addressed by understanding human suffering and its positive counterpart, human flourishing, rather than comparing and balancing ethical principles such as respecting patient autonomy versus not harming the patient (Beauchamp and Childress 2013). In such a phenomenological analysis the notion of togetherness, ultimately connecting to the political-philosophical issues of how we live together and take care of each other in a community, should be scrutinized. A person can only flourish, living a life in which she develops her own nature and prospects, in a community together with others, in a community based on values that reinforce a mutual responsibility for the common good (Arendt 1998). Consequently, euthanasia issues are ultimately authenticity and community issues rather than autonomy and not-harming issues only.

If we return to the third level of suffering surveyed above, we find the strongest arguments for, as well as against, allowing PAS/E by way of law. The reason the third level of suffering not only involves the strongest arguments for but also against allowing PAS/E is that the narrative identity, which can be felt to be impossible to live with in a situation that is perceived as an undignified condition, is a self-respect in the eyes of others (Taylor 1989, pp. 14–15). Persons constitute their value and worth in relationship to others, and if—as is often the case when persons became unable to take care of themselves in advanced age—they feel they should wish they were dead, they might say so, not only to their relatives, but also to their doctors. Increased patient autonomy has undoubtedly been one of the most important developments in late modern medicine—inter-nested with the rise of medical ethics as such in the 1960s and 1970s—but a too-narrow view of the person as a rational decision maker devoid of context and narrative is an easy and potentially dangerous way out of taking professional responsibility for the patient and his well-being (Halpern 2001; Jonsen 1998).

Drafting and passing laws concerning PAS/E could be considered as political actions in Hannah Arendt’s terminology (Arendt 1998). They involve performances on a public stage in which debating and passing judgements concerning the essence of human goods and rights are enacted. For Arendt, it is crucial that political performance is a way of showing ourselves in the sense of displaying who we are in front of others and exploring what views we may come to hold together with them by way of discussion. Actions in the political space are not only about defending human rights and just distribution of resources, it is also a matter of preventing existential questions from being swallowed up by issues of utility and productivity. It is a way of finding out who we are and what a human life worth living consists in. Arendt’s political philosophy finds its roots in the phenomenology and existential philosophy of Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers in which the question of human flourishing, in the sense of finding out who you/we are and what you/we want to live for, looms large (Loidolt 2018). The risk Arendt perceives and identifies in modern politics is precisely that the meaning of human life is taken to concern utility rather than human flourishing. A successful human life is taken to be a productive life in the sense of being profitable for the society. Such views become incorporated in totalitarian systems in which individuals are no longer respected or protected if they do not contribute to the common good of the race (Nazism) or the class (communism), but they may also thrive in liberal democracies, in which politics becomes business-like and in which existential questions become private-life issues only (Arendt 1973).

In such liberal societies, each and every one has the right to flourish in her own way, provided she can find the resources for her life-project, but the political sphere does not provide the existential discussion in which different views on human goods can be seriously discussed and defended. Arendt’s prognosis is that in such a situation the economic productivity-ideology will outflank the attempts to show that human lives are meaningful in ways that cannot be reduced to a utility and pleasure calculus only. To return to the dilemmas of end-of-life suffering and PAS/E, the question if a person’s life is worth living may very well become strongly influenced by the utility-productivity paradigm. If you do not feel much pleasure but rather pain, if you are no longer able to do things that make your life meaningful, and even less contribute to the flourishing of others, your life may quickly look like a useless productivity drain, stealing time and resources from others. If I ended up like that, you hear the others (at least imaginatively) saying, I wish I had the guts to kill myself, and, if I did not, I wish someone else had the pity to do it for me.

The risk of institutionalizing PAS/E is that an increasing number of human suffering situations will be viewed as irrational in the sense that they should better be avoided by way of ending them rather than continuing them if we have the choice. Some moral philosophers infected by the utility paradigm even hold that most, or even all, human lives are not worth living in comparison with not existing (Benatar 2006). However, as the phenomenological analysis of suffering and flourishing shows, the meaning of human life is not to be found in any pleasure-pain calculus but rather in a framework that addresses meaningfulness in terms of embodied moods, shared being-in-the-world and narratives. To allow PAS/E by way of law could be viewed as an empathic act in view of empowering patients and making it easier to end useless suffering, but if the society in which the law is implemented does not cultivate solidarity bonds with suffering persons in need of care, the law may rather reinforce the rationality-productivity paradigm by way of which an increasing number of dying persons will find it harder to make any sense of the remains of their suffering-afflicted lives.

The risks of implementing laws allowing for PAS/E increases with totalitarian tendencies in a society on the one hand and/or rationalistic tendencies in a society on the other. Leaving the obvious risks of totalitarian societies aside (think of the euthanasia programs for getting rid of “unworthy life” in Nazi Germany), it should be noticed that the countries that have implemented PAS/E laws so far often are highly secularised as concerns the world views of their citizens. The standard way of explaining this is that religion provides a ban on suicide and mercy killing that prevents the institutionalization of PAS/E, but a different understanding is that a religiously dominated culture provides a sphere for addressing existential questions and finding meaning in life beyond the pleasure-pain calculus by way of personal belief and religious worship.

A common claim, that is hard to evaluate, is that euthanasia is performed on a regular basis by doctors also in countries in which it is not (yet) allowed. Apparently, there exists a rather large grey zone in which palliative therapies to relieve pain also have the (un)intended side effect of making the lives of suffering patients a few days or even weeks shorter than would otherwise have been the case (Warraich 2017, pp. 249–266). Palliative sedation is another method in use, which may have the side effect of shortening the life of the patient, and which I have not discussed in this paper. The down side of keeping euthanasia in the grey zone as a side effect of pain management is that suffering due to not being able to engage in the world together with others or living up to one’s core life values (level 2 and 3) are generally not taken into account if they are not accompanied by severe bodily pain (level 1). The advantage of doing so (not implementing laws allowing for PAS/E) is that the utility paradigm is not encouraged to infect our views on human flourishing and suffering.

A pragmatic compromise ensuring that doctors stay within the palliative dimension and are not assigned the executive role of ending lives would be the so-called Oregon model institutionalized in an increasing number of states in the USA. This model allows for physician assisted suicide, but not euthanasia, when a patient suffers from a disease that will end his life within 6 months. Two independent doctors must be involved in the evaluation of the medical condition (predicted death within 6 months) and ensure that the patient is mentally competent and does not suffer from a treatable psychiatric condition (e.g., depression) which affects the decision. The Oregon model has been in use since 1997 and statistics show that it is the cause of death in around 0.4% of the cases of total number of deaths in the states in which it has been applied. In comparison PAS/E is the cause of death in around 4% of the total number of deaths in the countries—Belgium, The Netherlands, Luxemburg—that have legalized the right to euthanasia (Smer 2017, pp. 92–97). The right to receive euthanasia in BeNeLux applies to persons who experience suffering assessed to be unbearable and impossible to treat by the doctors, and the right is not exclusive to end of life suffering or to somatic in contrast to psychiatric cases of illness. The BeNeLux model has been in use since 2002 and has led to a steadily increasing number of deaths by way euthanasia in the practicing countries. If this is a good thing or a bad thing depends on the evaluation of the individual cases, but the rather high numbers motivate the concerns I have voiced above about existentially unaware politics. On the other hand, one could make the argument that the legalizing of euthanasia is a perfect example of a highly aware existential politics, which does not shy away from the important questions on what kinds of human lives are worth living. However, the worry would still stand that the political discussion in the countries in question have not sufficiently considered the ways in which a person’s dignity and wish to live is dependent on how her life appears in the eyes of others when vulnerable and desperately in need of solidary assistance and support from fellow human beings. The phenomenological analysis developed in this article provides resources to identify these dimensions of human suffering in a systematic way and underline their importance in an existentially aware political discussion about the pros and cons of legalizing PAS/E.

Conclusion

Medicine and end of life ethics could profit from a phenomenological theory of suffering in several ways. First, by acknowledging and becoming better in understanding the attuned, experientially-integrated multi-level character of suffering. Second, by better understanding how different levels of experience—embodiment, daily activities, core life values—could all be important and interconnected in mitigating (or possibly ending) suffering for a person. Third, by better understanding what wholeness and completeness may mean to a dying person, that is: what it means to have completed a human life, dying as the person one wants to have been, in one’s own eyes, and in the eyes of others. The phenomenological account of suffering as a multi-level experientially-integrated phenomenon could also be used to articulate a better informed existential-political argument about the implementation of physician assisted suicide and/or euthanasia. In this way phenomenology may assist and contribute to the analysis of medical ethical dilemmas associated with end of life suffering within the domains of health care and within society as a whole.

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#phenomenology #literature and medicine #leo tolstoy #suffering #narrative #dying #palliative care #assisted suicide #euthanasia #ivan ilych #hermeneutics #medicine #medicine and society #medical ethics #existentialism #martin heidegger

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queenfreakblog-blog · 6 years

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Effective Startup Dining Establishment Service Program

The process of opening a restaurant from start to finish can be, as well as should be, an arduous one. It needs a remarkable amount of research study and resolution, and also it can quickly obtain overwhelming. Typically customers ask, "Exactly what should I be doing?" It's the ideal question, but not quickly answered. Why? There is an entire variety of things that should be done at the same time in opening up any kind of service, yet particularly one as facility as a dining establishment.

So, where do you start? The best place to begin is with a plan, of course. Without one, it's like shooting from the hip. Simply trusting your impulses is a recipe for failing. "If you aren't sure where you're going, you are not likely to obtain anywhere beneficial." So you begin with a service strategy, a tested structure of success as well as the plan to your dream coming to be reality. A quotation worth keeping in mind and implementing is, "Failing to strategy is preparing to stop working" from The 7 Habits of Highly EffectivePeople, Stephen R. Covey).

Let's describe 2 crucial actions essential to produce an effective organisation plan:

1. You must have a suggestion of the sort of restaurant you want. That implies generating a well-balanced idea, picturing it with graphics, and explaining in writing. Your entire organisation strategy will progress from this: how to bring that dream dining establishment to life; ways to offer it its distinct individuality; as well as what makes it different from other restaurants.

2. Research successful dining establishments in order to develop a design that fits what you have in mind. You don't have to duplicate them, simply identify why you think they achieve success. Is it their food? Is it their pleasant service or atmosphere? Most likely it will certainly be all three, fitting together to develop an overall principle: great food, punctual as well as alert service, and a comfy, if not one-of-a-kind, ambience.

I like to utilize the example of a three-legged bleeding feces to drive this point residence. If one leg is weak, then the entire stool is weak and breaks down, with any luck not with you on it.

When I suggest picking up from observing other effective restaurants, maintain this thought in mind. Your restaurant suggestion must be distinctly yours. Combine the most effective parts of various other effective dining establishments right into your personal creative version of exactly what you desire. Possibly it's the personal solution as well as distinct food discussion that you have actually delighted in at one dining establishment, or the style theme at one more. Blend all the components that you really feel make those dining establishments effective right into your very own complete concept of food, atmosphere, and also solution, and you will certainly have produced your very own initial.

Initially, make an overview of what your organisation plan will include. Remember, BE SPECIFIC! Composing an organisation plan pressures you to analyze where you are going, just how you prepare to get there, and it is a tried and real guidebook to success. By organizing your reasoning, you are a lot more able to convert your thoughts to paper (or a computer screen) as well as see a strenuous strategy begin to materialize.

BUSINESS STRATEGY

The Exec Recap: Your Executive Summary need to be short and two-fold, including:

1.) A well-thought-out, compressed variation of the business strategy, a plan in developing your dining establishment principle.

2.) The exec recap supplies a lender, or possible financier, an insight right into your thinking and an indicated promise commercial. Condensed and to the point, the exec summary provides your prospective capitalists the significance of business strategy without having to digest the entire file, and produces an immediate interest to check out better.

The Business Structure: Define the legal organisation entity that you have actually picked to perform your company. Your accounting professional and also legal representative will encourage you based on your personal circumstances.

Dining Establishment Solution Categories: Just how will you supply service to your clients? Are you thinking of table solution, with a delay as well as bus team, or the minimal staff of fast-food or fast-casual solution systems?

Your service idea will certainly figure out the certifications required of the workers you will employ as well as the pay scale appropriate to each.

Service: Exactly what perspective as well as individuality should your service staff display screen? How will they connect with your consumers? From behind a counter, in a junk food setting, or up close as well as personal, taking and also bringing orders directly to the table with a smile. Excellent solution, plus a pleasant mindset of your wait personnel goes a long way in bringing your consumers back.

Food selection: Draw up your menu. Be specific, with a comprehensive summary of each menu thing and projected pricing. Clarify why you have chosen the food selection products as well as exactly how they relate to your solution system. Making a Caesar salad table-side does not work in a convenience food restaurant. The menu and your service system are the foundation of your restaurant.

Client Profile: In this area, you will certainly describe your target clients, clarifying that your target market potential consumers are: their age, sex, earnings, line of work, marriage condition. Present as clear an account of your targeted customer as feasible, with a sharp eye to demographics. Write out what you believe it is, and after that sustain your supposition with truths to support just how you view the demographics.

Competitors: What are the various other dining establishments in the instant location of your location? Exactly how does your concept for food, service, design, and ambience vary from them? Which sorts of dining establishments are doing the very best business?

Marketing Method: Describe your advertising approach, factor by factor. Show how it meshes with your idea. A profile of your target market is crucial, especially the particular market within a one- to three-mile distance of your dining establishment area. By adopting a hands-on, personalized approach in your advertising efforts, you will certainly prevent the unnecessary costs of an information media project.

Area, Place, Area: Explain why you selected the location of your restaurant as well as why you feel it is best-suited to bring in customers. Highlight the vital demographics of your area, as well as why the menu, theme, as well as design carefully match the profile of your target market.

Ownership: Provide the owners/partners of your company as well as the percentages each will obtain. Specify exactly what function they will play in the company as well as include their resumes. A financial institution will undoubtedly intend to see the economic statements of each, and their last two years' tax returns.

Management: State thoroughly what your monitoring technique will certainly be. Will the primary proprietor, or owners, feature as basic manager or will you hire a seasoned GM? Regardless works, as long as you, the owner, are concentrated on doing the appropriate points, and making sure that your supervisor is doing points right, that is, those points that make a dining establishment lucrative. State the essential placements of your administration group.

Operational Solutions: Specify your operational systems, the navigational instruments and tail of your wonderful ship. They established the training course, guiding the ship on a straight as well as smooth course. Just how will you make sure training, regular ongoing procedures, and also effective controls? This ought to be summed up in your Business Strategy.

Financial Demands: Program your monetary needs in four main areas:

1. Building and construction build-out price per square Foot

2. FF&E (furnishings, fixtures & devices), consisting of the style package-pictures/paintings, etc.

3. Expert charges: lawful, accountancy, architectural, licenses, permits, as well as various fees

4. Working capital: sufficient for opening inventories, pre-opening expenditures such as training, and staying power while the business accelerates.

Interior Layout and Altitude Renderings: In this section of your business strategy, you will need to provide a layout and elevation rendering of your dining establishment.

Sales, Profit & Loss Projections: This section ought to reveal, in spread sheet style, sales estimates, which are crucial to developing a budget. The amount of rent, food expenses, as well as labor prices subtracted from sales will certainly establish the majority of your bottom line.

If you will scrutinize and also look into each of these actions, and also follow this service strategy outline, you will certainly discover the information needed to provide you the very best possibility for success.

Tom Wilscam's book is a wonderful source for anybody intending to see just how a startup dining establishment specialist could aid in making their restaurant a success. The means he offers the information is interesting and easy to understand. Guide is well arranged, well edited as well as well established. The cover is eye catching.

For more than 40 years, Wilscam has actually run as well as assisted others start restaurants. His experience has actually shown him the value of having a proven principle, standardized operating procedures and also the capability to help the new dining establishment proprietor succeed.

For More Information Find Out Here

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