When The End Comes

Last week I chatted with a physician about the assisted suicide ruling in British Columbia for Gloria Taylor who suffers from ALS. She brought it up, and she wasn't addressing it from an overtly Christian perspective., although she is a Christian. The observations she made were interesting and I have heard them from other doctors, including some who wrote letters to the editor of one of our national newspapers.

One was that people seem to assume that doctors are okay with being promoted to god status, making decisions about administering drugs which would end a person's life, just because they have knowledge and now permission to do so. She is involved in palliative care and appreciates the checks and balances for physicians which are currently in place, in part because families sometimes want to make decisions about life and death in the midst of deep emotional distress.

She also offered that we can get caught up in individual circumstances when we also need to ask what is in place for the greater good of our society. Obviously Ms Taylor deserves compassion and ALS is a terrible disease. Still, we have both been part of situations where unscrupulous family members can hardly wait for a loved one to check out. Then there are the individuals who feel they are a burden to their families so assume that ending one's life is the only solution.

She pointed out as well that people often think that the decision-making will be straightforward, that it will be evident when the time has come for death. Again, both of us have seen how uncertain and confusing all this can be.

I think we agree that there needs to be a larger societal discussion about the sanctity of life and the opportunities for a dignified and relatively painless death which isn't directly tied to suicide. Families are generally not good about having these conversations other than a cursory "don't make me linger" notion.

When we had our End of Life Issues seminar last Fall we addressed some of these issues, but there is nothing simple about this and one event is not enough.

Have you talked about "The End" with your family, physican, clergy person? Does the BC ruling reassure you or concern you? Are you suspicious that your teens would gladly "pull the plug!"