Today is the day I have chosen to pass away.
So wrote Brittany Maynard, 29, who died her way on Saturday after taking an injection of lethal drugs. Her note said:
"Goodbye to all my dear friends and family that I love. Today is the day I have chosen to pass away with dignity in the face of my terminal illness, this terrible brain cancer that has taken so much from me … but would have taken so much more. The world is a beautiful place, travel has been my greatest teacher, my close friends and folks are the greatest givers. I even have a ring of support around my bed as I type … Goodbye world. Spread good energy. Pay it forward!"
Some celebrated Maynard's courage and determination and said her passing has drawn young people into the discussion over the right to die.
"She's changed the debate by changing the audience of the debate," Abraham Schwab, an associate professor of philosophy at Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne, told the Associated Press.
Marcia Angell, a former editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, argues in the Washington Post today that Maynard's choice should also have been an option for her husband, Dr. Arnold S. Relman, who chaired the Department of Medicince at Penn and who also suffered from terminal cancer:
He knew very well what lay ahead of him. His concern was not so much with suffering as with having his mind affected by the drugs he would need to prevent suffering. He was asking for the option of ending his life in the way he chose. In June, he died at home in Massachusetts, with hospice care, but not in the way he wanted. I see no reason he should have been denied that final measure of control.
The case of Brittany Maynard, however, may finally signal a shift in this debate. Whereas hastening an inevitable death was once regarded almost exclusively as a medical issue, we are beginning to focus on what patients want, on their right to self-determination. And people are increasingly asking why anyone — the state, the medical profession, religious leaders — would presume to tell someone else that they must continue to die by inches, against their will.
Many took exception with Maynard's decision, however, particularly those with strongly held religious beliefs.
Joni Eareckson Tada, an evangelical Christian who also suffers from a brain tumor, wrote last month for the Religion News Service: "I understand she may be in great pain, and her treatment options are limited and have their own devastating side effects, but I believe Brittany is missing a critical factor in her formula for death: God."
Likewise, Philip Johnson, a Catholic seminarian in Raleigh, N.C., was quoted by USA Today a saying: "Suffering is not worthless, and our lives are not our own to take. As humans we are relational — we relate to one another and the actions of one person affect others."
Time magazine said Maynard's death may well reinvigorate the "death with dignity" movement that has run out of steam in most of the country.
"In a way," the magazine said, "the Death with Dignity movement has been waiting years for someone like Maynard. In the public imagination, the person most often associated with aid-in-dying is Jack Kevorkian, the late Michigan physician who was known as Dr. Death. . . . Maynard may have been Kevorkian’s polar opposite: a young, sunny schoolteacher who should have had far more of life ahead than behind."
An obituary on thebrittanyfund website noted her extensive travels, teaching in orphanages in Katmandu, Nepal, climbing to the top of Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, touring southeast Asia and Latin America. It went on: "She believed in compassion, equity, and that people would remember most how you made them feel in life. As Faulkner said, 'Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion against injustice and lying and greed. If more people all over the world would do this, the world would change.'"
Maynard leaves her husband of one year, her parents and her two dogs, a Beagle and a Great Dane.
