Brittany Maynard, 29, was diagnosed in April of this year with a stage 4 malignant brain tumor and given six months to live. She also learned how she would suffer in the end, losing her ability to speak and use of her own body. So, earlier this month, she made plans to die on her own terms. Those terms ended on Saturday. She took medication prescribed by a physician that ended her life while in her bedroom in Portland, Oregon in the presence of her husband and parents.
“I don’t want to die,” Maynard told CBS “This Morning.” But she said she was suffering from “bone-splitting” headaches, seizures and “moments when I’m looking at my husband’s face and I can’t think of his name.”
At the time of her diagnosis, Maynard was living in San Francisco with her husband. Doctors prescribed full brain radiation. She looked at the side effects and alternative treatments. She even looked at hospice care. “After months of research, my family and I reached a heartbreaking conclusion,” she wrote in an op-ed for CNN. “There is no treatment that would save my life, and the recommended treatments would have destroyed the time I had left.”
“For people to argue against this choice for sick people really seems evil to me,” she told PEOPLE. “They try to mix it up with suicide and that’s really unfair, because there’s not a single part of me that wants to die. But I am dying.”
So she chose doctor-assisted death. However, California, like most states, does not have a law allowing terminal patients to end their lives. So she and her family relocated to Oregon, where she qualified for doctor-assisted suicide. Portland is one of five states with legal protections for terminally-ill patients who want to end their suffering.
It was Brittany’s choice. However, the debate has raged with opponents of physician-assisted suicide. You can understand the moral and religious concerns. Others worry that some people struggling with depression and mental disease would use such laws to end their mental suffering instead.
The Bible mentions six specific people who committed suicide: Abimelech (Judges 9:54), Saul (1 Samuel 31:4), Saul’s armor-bearer (1 Samuel 31:4–6), Ahithophel (2 Samuel 17:23), Zimri (1 Kings 16:18), and Judas (Matthew 27:5). Some consider Samson’s death an instance of suicide, because he knew his actions would lead to his death (Judges 16:26–31).
The Psalmist says “My times are in your hands” (Psalm 31:15). In Job, God is the giver of life. He gives, and He takes away (Job 1:21). I understand theologically that suicide, the taking of one’s own life, can be seen as ungodly because it rejects God’s gift of life. I understand how no man or woman should presume to take God’s authority upon themselves to end his or her own life. But God is sovereign and is never surprised by our actions. Was Brittany’s timing the timing of God too perhaps?
I have a personal stake in this. I understand the spiritual and theological implications. I have weighed them personally.
For those that have come to a quick decision on this emotionally charged topic…please guard your judgment carefully until you have held the hand and looked in the eyes of a loved one as they die. Until you have made the personal decision to remove palliative care, signed a DNR, and taped it to their bedroom door and bed frame in case paramedics arrive before you do.
I pray you never have to walk through this situation, but until you do I envy your ability to judge a person’s end of life choice. I envy you because that means you have not been through the hell that others have as a caregiver to a terminally ill family member.
I have had to do this four times as an adult. I pray you never have to…but I caution you too to temper your words and judgment. Be slow to call into question her thoughts, feelings, misgivings, pain, or suffering. And for those that have, I can not imagine anything more disrespectful than accusing her of “using the disease as an excuse or cause.”
My father was treated for a brain tumor that was destroying his ability to communicate and reason. He ultimately refused further care that was keeping him alive so he could speak to us and eventually die in my mother’s arms. Did his decision end his life prematurely?
Years later my mother refused to eat after months of struggling with pancreatic cancer. A month before she died the chemo therapy drugs she was taking caused clots in her arteries. We had a stint put in. It would save her life but she didn’t want to die of a heart attack. We took her home and we gave her morphine drops until she died in our arms from cancer. Did her decision hasten her death?
My grandmother was 98 and diagnosed with pancreatitis too. She refused treatment that could have kept her alive. Did she commit suicide?
I pray you never have these experiences…but please guard your words until you have sat on a loved ones bed through tears and prayers and discussed whether to let them die. You have no idea of the “timing,” private conversations, and prayers between her husband and her doctors.
I have found nothing telling me of Brittany’s spiritual life. I do hope she knew that she was bought with a price. I pray she knew she was loved by Jesus. I pray she knew that her life was not our own. She lived and she died and she suffered for the glory of Christ, our Lord. “The sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us” (Romans 8:18). I pray that Brittany’s timing was God’s too.
To Brittany’s husband and parents…I have no idea as to the eternal state of Brittany’s soul but I do know she would want you to know that as her knees and head are bowing right now to Christ that she desperately hopes you will now give your remaining days to “prepare for the eternal weight of glory” with Him. (2 Corinthians 4:17).
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