Brittany Maynard, 29, died on Nov. 1. To be more accurate, she killed herself.
Earlier that year, she was diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor and was given six months to live. Because this disease would destroy her life long before her natural death, she left California — where physician-assisted suicide is illegal — and moved to Portland, Ore., one of five states that allow some version of assistance in dying to patients who face an imminent death.
Maynard celebrated her husband’s birthday on Oct. 26, then, on Nov. 1, she ingested a lethal, but legal, prescription and died quietly at a time and place of her own choosing.
Before she died, Maynard issued an appeal to California legislators to legalize physician-assisted suicide. Last week the California Senate approved a bill — the End of Life Option Act — that represents a tentative first step toward that goal.
The complexities of this issue are embodied in questions and stories: Why do we expect loved ones to endure lingering, miserable deaths while we assure that our pets and serial killers die as free from pain as possible? How do we assure that aid in dying isn’t misused by the temporarily depressed? How do we protect the elderly from manipulative, impatient heirs? Are we violating some divine mandate about the integrity of life by avoiding the suffering that often accompanies death?
And then there are the stories: Last week, Annabelle Gurwitch described in The New York Times her efforts to help a friend find a peaceful exit from life rather than suffer a miserable death from pancreatic cancer. She and four of the patient’s closest friends assembled at her bedside, said their goodbyes, then gave her a huge overdose — illegally; this was in California — from the patient’s collection of prescription drugs.
But Annabelle and her friends were amateurs, and in this gruesome tale their friend suffered much longer than she would have had had her death occurred under the supervision of a physician.
Another story: In 2012, Barbara Wise suffered triple cerebral aneurysms and was bedridden in a Cleveland hospital. Her husband of 45 years, John, smuggled a pistol into the hospital and fired a single shot into her head. She died the next day.
Even though John Wise and his wife had both agreed that neither wanted to live in a bedridden state, prosecutors charged the 66-year-old Wise with aggravated murder. In December 2013, he was sentenced to six years in prison.
Then there’s George Sanders, 86, whose wife begged him to kill her after she could no longer stand the pain and debilitation of multiple sclerosis.
Stories like these are abundant, and as medicine increases our capacity to prolong life, they’re likely to become more common. In themselves, they don’t make the case for physician-assisted suicide as much as they testify to the desperation experienced by families whose loved ones are beyond hope of anything more than a prolonged death.
But perhaps they will also provoke us to begin a conversation about the quality of life as opposed to its length. We’re a nation that believes in personal freedom. But the ultimate freedom is exercising some control over when and how we die. That privilege could eliminate a great deal of unnecessary suffering and, perhaps, even alleviate some of our inherent fear of death.
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