Death Stub

Content Warning: euthanasia, suicide.

What would you do if today was your last day? How different would it be if you had known about it for the last 6 months?

This is what had been going through my mind the last wee while. I thought that by the time today came around I would feel a bit calmer than I do now, maybe even a sense of relief. But this morning I woke up with a feeling of anxiety in the pit of my stomach. Did I do everything I was supposed to? You would think at 96 I wouldn’t give a fuck anymore, but even at this age, I still thought about my kids a lot. The last thing I wanted to do was leave them cleaning up after me.

The last few months had been spent meeting with family, friends, and people of my past. While others wanted closure and reparations for things that happened in the past, I didn’t feel any such regrets and only wanted to spend my last few months doing things I loved and spending time with the people I cared about.

All my possessions and assets had already been doled out. That happened 6 months ago when I applied for my death stub. You might be wondering what that is. Well, after the slowdown in the mid-20s, overpopulation had once again become a major problem, and now with better healthcare, people often lived to the 120s. This had made the Death Stub a necessity. So after much debate in 2055, voluntary euthanasia was introduced as a necessary—although complex—process. Was “death stub” the term that doctors and those in the industry used? Haha, absolutely not. But after a popular meme where it was referenced as a ticket stub for the train to the next life, there was no going back.

The whole ordeal was just as convoluted as just about any government process—but that actually made sense to me in this case. There was so much room for abuse when it comes to matters of life and death and the influence family can have on the elderly (especially when inheritance is involved).

So when I showed up to my first death stub interview, I was expecting a strong duty of care from the interviewer. But I wasn’t expecting the interrogation that came with it. At one point I joked that I should be recording the interviews to make my memoirs, but that hadn’t gone over well with the interviewer. She was a middle-aged woman with a dark purple suit that looked so starchy and robust that it could be body armour, and clearly took her job very seriously, which in a way eased my mind a little.

At the end of the series of interviews over a two-week period, I received my death stub in person.

The object that let me kill myself.

It was a bit smaller than a hockey puck in my hand and would last a year before it became defunct. Turning it over in my palm, I remembered the interviewer’s instructions from earlier. The device could be opened with a pre-programmed voice command—this was just the first layer of biometric identification. Then I would have to place my thumb on the pad, which would then scan my fingerprint (the second), then prick my thumb for a blood sample, which, while not a full DNA test, would randomly sample a few thousand alleles for a good enough match (the third). Lastly, an RNA virus would be injected into my bloodstream via my thumb that would cause me to become drowsy, lethargic, and eventually go to sleep. Then the virus would begin shutting down internal organs, beginning with the brain. She warned that once my thumb was down, there was no turning back, so it wasn’t prudent to even open it until I was ready.

I liked that it meant I could choose the terms of my death and use the device whenever and wherever I wanted. In reality, it had been sitting in my bottom drawer untouched for the last six months.

So here I was, lying in bed on the Sunday morning that I had planned to be my last. Of course, I didn’t tell anyone my plans. I didn’t want any fussing over me or, worse yet, anyone around when it happened. In fact, I had even gone so far as inviting people to a “Last Hooray” party in a couple of months’ time. A lot of people used their death stubs earlier than they told others, so these days you had to come up with some pretty elaborate lies to get away with this.

But unlike others, I hadn’t planned anything for today. No last meal, no adventure out into the beauty of nature to say goodbye. Nothing.

Bzzzd.

I looked at my phone to see an invitation from my daughter Ivy for coffee. She lived nearby, and we often caught up in the morning for a cuppa before she started work.

The anxiety inside tugged. I had seen her just two days ago, but one more time before I go—how could I say no? But how would she feel? Would she find comfort in knowing she was the last person I wanted to see before I left? Or would she worry that she pushed me to do it early?

I took a moment to consider before typing out a message.

“Morning, Louise, would love to, but I woke up with a bad migraine. Raincheck?”

Looking down at the message, I felt more anxiety than I did thinking about death. Was that the last message I wanted her to get from me?

I wish that these were some of the things I had discussed with them 6 months ago when I applied for the death stub. But would they have told me the truth then? Or just said what they thought I wanted to hear?

Holding backspace, the cursor jumped back a few times and then deleted the whole message.

I typed out another message: “Sounds good, see you in 5?”

I could always kill myself tomorrow.