There is an article in the NYTimes today about a man in Italy fighting for his right to die. Sixty year old Piergiorgio Welby has battled muscular dystrophy for 40 years and has been kept alive by a respirator for 9. He is begging the Italian government to let him die.
“Life is the woman who loves you, the wind through your hair, the sun on your face, an evening stroll with a friend. Life is also a woman who leaves you, a rainy day, a friend who deceives you. I am neither melancholic nor manic-depressive. I find the idea of dying horrible. But what is left to me is no longer a life… It is an unbearable torture”.
This very topic sparked the first fight Clint and I have had. We were on the way to have dinner with his parents and we got started talking about Terri Shiavo. I remember getting so angry with him because he sincerely felt like the doctors should not have let her die.
So here’s why this is a big deal to me: my aunt Brenda was diagnosed with chronic progressive Multiple Schlerosis when she was 18. If you don’t know what MS is, it’s a disease of the central nervous system that breaks down the myelin sheaths in your body that carry neurons (essentially orders) from your brain to the rest of you body. As MS progresses, the patient loses the ability to perform certain functions because the impulses from the brain are no longer making it to their destinations. Slowly over time, MS patients lose the ability to write, to walk, to speak correctly, to see, and even to hold their bowels. I watched this happen to my aunt. I watched her die.
We got a call December 5, 2004 that Brenda had gone into the hospital. Her catheter bag was filled with blood and she was yellow with jaundice. For the first two days the doctors were baffled, they tried to give her antibiotics through a PICC line and collapsed a major vein. She never once complained. She just sat and stared. Then they found the problem: leukemia. The doctors pushed very hard for treatment and said that at the max it would give her 6 months. We all knew she would never make it. She had begun to cough and flecks of blood dotted her dry lips. She went into a coma that night and no longer responded to our touch. Her breathing became labored gasps. They asked us if we’d like for her to be put on a respirator, but we refused. The doctor ordered a morphine drip, the first pain medicine she had received since being admitted, and together, as a family we watched her breathe her last breath.
I realize that this is an ongoing debate between sanctity of life versus quality of life. Yes, I believe that life is sacred, but I also believe that keeping her alive would have been profoundly wrong. To artificially keep someone bound to a body that is already dead is like theft, its robbing the soul. And what kills me about this man’s case is that he’s fighting the church! The church has reduced his desire to die naturally as doctor-assisted euthanasia. What happened to “To live is Christ and die is gain”? Aren’t we as Christians supposed to long for death because only in death can we be free? Do we really believe that, and if we do, why is doctor-assisted euthanasia wrong for those kept alive only by artificial means? I just don’t think it is.
“Life is the woman who loves you, the wind through your hair, the sun on your face, an evening stroll with a friend. Life is also a woman who leaves you, a rainy day, a friend who deceives you. I am neither melancholic nor manic-depressive. I find the idea of dying horrible. But what is left to me is no longer a life… It is an unbearable torture”.
This very topic sparked the first fight Clint and I have had. We were on the way to have dinner with his parents and we got started talking about Terri Shiavo. I remember getting so angry with him because he sincerely felt like the doctors should not have let her die.
So here’s why this is a big deal to me: my aunt Brenda was diagnosed with chronic progressive Multiple Schlerosis when she was 18. If you don’t know what MS is, it’s a disease of the central nervous system that breaks down the myelin sheaths in your body that carry neurons (essentially orders) from your brain to the rest of you body. As MS progresses, the patient loses the ability to perform certain functions because the impulses from the brain are no longer making it to their destinations. Slowly over time, MS patients lose the ability to write, to walk, to speak correctly, to see, and even to hold their bowels. I watched this happen to my aunt. I watched her die.
We got a call December 5, 2004 that Brenda had gone into the hospital. Her catheter bag was filled with blood and she was yellow with jaundice. For the first two days the doctors were baffled, they tried to give her antibiotics through a PICC line and collapsed a major vein. She never once complained. She just sat and stared. Then they found the problem: leukemia. The doctors pushed very hard for treatment and said that at the max it would give her 6 months. We all knew she would never make it. She had begun to cough and flecks of blood dotted her dry lips. She went into a coma that night and no longer responded to our touch. Her breathing became labored gasps. They asked us if we’d like for her to be put on a respirator, but we refused. The doctor ordered a morphine drip, the first pain medicine she had received since being admitted, and together, as a family we watched her breathe her last breath.
I realize that this is an ongoing debate between sanctity of life versus quality of life. Yes, I believe that life is sacred, but I also believe that keeping her alive would have been profoundly wrong. To artificially keep someone bound to a body that is already dead is like theft, its robbing the soul. And what kills me about this man’s case is that he’s fighting the church! The church has reduced his desire to die naturally as doctor-assisted euthanasia. What happened to “To live is Christ and die is gain”? Aren’t we as Christians supposed to long for death because only in death can we be free? Do we really believe that, and if we do, why is doctor-assisted euthanasia wrong for those kept alive only by artificial means? I just don’t think it is.
