The Right to Die with Dignity

Per the news lately, a friend shared this incredibly moving and powerful story today on facebook.

In it, one brother asked another:

“But,” I went on to say, “what I do know is that we love you so much, and we want to be able to love you all the way through this; we would support you, and it would never be a burden on us to be with you and care for you even in your suffering. Tony, please, let us do that for you. Let us love you to the end, whenever that may be.”

And that spoke to me.  Very, very much.   People responded to my friend's sharing of this article with comments about how watching their loved ones lose their faculties wasn't dignified, how they don't want to become a burden to others, they don't want to create "bitter" memories.

And that breaks my heart.  Our culture's view of weakness and vulnerability and death is just so... sad.

And honestly, it makes me a little angry.

When I was 11 years old, I watched, as much as I could understand and participate at that age, my grandmother Moe be diagnosed, treated and die of breast cancer in 6 months.

For roughly the last month, she was on home hospice care and required... care.  From my grandfather, my mother, my aunts and my uncles.

And it was not a burden.

It was a gift.

A gift that she gave to us: her weakness, her smallness, her pain, her suffering - was a gift that we might serve her as she spent her own life in service to her own family and friends.

The last few weeks, she was increasingly unable to talk, ate less and less and had increased doses of morphine as the cancer spread to every corner of her once healthy, strong, athletic body, now frail and literally lumpy with tumors.

I was only eleven and even then I was struck by how profound these moments were.  How precious and how completely unrepeatable they were.

None of us ever EVER wished pain and suffering on Moe and any and all of us would have gladly born it if we could, but she gave *us* the gift of her suffering and death.  My mother washed her own mother's body in the shower after she wasn't able to do so anymore just as my grandmother had washed my mother has a child.  The beauty and the pain were inseparable and one could not be had without the other.

Death is hard.  Death is messy and ugly.  Death is profound.

And death like that?  Like my grandmother?  *That* is death with dignity.

It is a gift that can never be given again.  Suicide and euthanasia rob *everyone* involved of that gift.

As the story I shared above said:

No, dignity isn’t opposed to suffering; sometimes in suffering dignity reveals its truest face.