The assisted suicide advocacy group Compassion and Choices (formerly the Hemlock Society) doesn't want you to believe that assisted suicide by the terminally ill is really suicide.  The organization's "language kit," designed to help assisted suicide advocates promote their agenda in the media, complains that using the accurate and descriptive word "suicide" to describe self-killing by the dying is a pejorative term that paints "terminally-ill patients in the same negative light as terrorist bombers."

This is a ridiculous assertion.  First, to state that a terminally ill person who dies after intentionally swallowing a drug overdose has "committed suicide" is not to equate him with Osama bin Laden; it is to describe accurately the cause of death.  But more importantly, to claim that the dying, unlike other suicidal persons, don't really commit suicide when they kill themselves, is to imply strongly that the terminally ill are as good as dead anyway.

This may be the crucial point in the whole assisted suicide debate.  What these advocates don't understand is that dying isn't dead: It is living.  Indeed, as hospice workers and pastors can attest, the time of dying can be one of the most important and worthwhile stages of life that people ever experience.

My friend Bob proves the point.  When I met Bob as a hospice volunteer about eight years ago, he was in his mid-40s and completely disabled from ALS, sometimes called Lou Gehrig's disease.  As we became good friends, he explained to me that he had become suicidal after receiving his devastating diagnosis. At that time, he told me, "If I could have gone to Jack Kevorkian, I would have."

I asked whether his suicidal despair had been caused by becoming progressively disabled.  Bob had always been athletic and he found it very hard to lose his physical capacities, he said.  But he became suicidal because he felt abandoned by his community.  As he put it: "First, my friends stopped visiting me.  Then, my friends stopped calling me.  Then, they stopped calling my wife, and I felt like a token presence in the world."

After two years of utter despair, Bob told me that he "came out of the fog" and was very glad to be alive.  He resented the notion that because he had a terrible illness some people advocated that his death be facilitated, whereas other suicidal people were to receive suicide prevention.  Indeed, he was so offended by the assisted suicide movement that he authored an opinion column for the February 19, 1997 San Francisco Chronicle, in which he wrote: [Accessible here by scrolling down: ]

Euthanasia advocates believe they are doing people like me a favor. They are not. The negative emotions toward the terminally ill and disabled generated by their advocacy is actually at the expense of the "dying" and their families and friends…What we, the terminally ill, need is exactly the opposite—to realize how important our lives are. And our loved ones, friends, and, indeed, society need to help us feel that we are loved and appreciated unconditionally.

Bob received this kind of inclusion from his family and eventually from the members of a new church he joined when some missionaries came to his door.  He spent the last months of his life enjoying his wife and three daughters, making money for his family with on-line investing, and collecting art.  He died peacefully in his sleep, having achieved a truly "good death" in a state of transcendence and calm acceptance.

Bob's experience was not unusual.  Dr. Ira Byock, the former president of the American Academy of Hospice and Palliative Medicine and author of the splendid, Dying Well: The Prospect for Growth at the End of Life, put it this way when I interviewed him a few years ago: "Dying is a very scary, extraordinary time of life that requires adjustments and changes in expectations.  But so do other times of change, such as marriage, having a child, or losing a spouse.  What I have seen and know to be true is that people can exert a sense of mastery over this stage of life."

As Bob did.  And his story reminds us vividly that there is a vast difference between "wanting" to die out of fear of losing dignity and worries about being a burden—reasons usually cited by people wanting assisted suicide in Oregon—and being "ready" to die at peace, with calm acceptance when one comes to the natural end of life's journey.

Or, as Bob so beautifully summarized the point in his article: "In my view, the pro-euthanasia followers' posture is a great threat to the foundation upon which all life is based, and that is hope. I exhort everyone: Life is worth living, and life is worth receiving. I know. I live it every day."

"Cast Me Not Off in Old Age"

This cultural myopia is no trivial matter. Indeed, in the mass geriatric society it could have deadly consequences. For unless we learn to accept both our frailties and our finitude, we are likely to find the burdens of caregiving intolerable. And unless we learn how to let loved ones die when the time comes, we will be tempted to kill--self-righteously, of course, in the guise of a false compassion. Sooner or later, when the medical gospel of healthy aging and the legal gospel of living wills are shown to have been false teachings, we may easily fall prey to the utilitarian gospel of euthanasia, whose prophets are patiently waiting in the wings for their time upon our cultural stage. Paradoxically, a dogmatic insistence that patients must be kept alive regardless of the depth of their disabilities--that severe dementia or unmanageable suffering deserves no consideration in deciding when to "let nature take its course"--may only make mercy killing appear to be the more compassionate remedy for the miseries of extended decline.

In the end, there is no "solution" to the problems of old age, at least no solution that any civilized society could tolerate. But there are better and worse ways to see our aging condition. The better way begins in thinking of ourselves less as wholly autonomous individuals than as members of families; in relinquishing our mistaken belief that medicine can miraculously liberate our loved ones or ourselves from debility and decline, and instead taking up our role as caregivers; and in abjuring the fantasy that we can control the manner and the hour of our dying, learning instead to accept death in its proper season as mortal beings replaced and renewed by the generations that follow.

Eric Cohen and Leon R. Kass

Articulating a Distinctly Christian Approach to Suffering

Someone has observed that when a revolutionary group wishes to wage war on what Christians hold to be sacred, the first--and most effective--strategy is to co-opt language in the service of the cause. It is therefore not surprising that proponents of physician-assisted death routinely speak in terms of "compassion" and human "dignity." As they seek to expand their agenda both on a popular level and in the context of policy debates, the rhetoric of compassion allows them to capture the moral high ground.

J. Daryl Charles Ph.D

Suffering Together

Jesus, fell to the ground and prayed that if possible the hour might pass from him. Abba, Father, he said, "everything is possible for you. Take this cup from me, yet not what I will, but what you will." Then he returned to his disciples and found them sleeping. "Simon," he said to Peter, "are you asleep? Could you not keep watch for one hour? Watch and pray so that you will not fall into temptations. The spirit is willing, but the body is weak." Once more he went away and prayed the same thing. When he came back, he again found them sleeping because their eyes were heavy. They did not know what to say to him. Returning the third time, he said to them, "Are you still sleeping and resting? Enough! The hour has come, Look, the Son of Man is betrayed into the hands of sinners. Rise! Let us go! Here comes my betrayer!"
(Mark 16: 35-42, NIV)

But this description of the enormous suffering Jesus experienced in anticipation of the torturous death to come does contain an important moral imperative. Jesus expected his followers to be in prayer with him, and be a companion to him while he was suffering. And he sought of his followers companionship. In short, followers of Jesus owe compassion to those who suffer.

by Arthur J. Dyck

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