A young woman diagnosed with ALS in 2013 recently gathered friends and family for an assisted suicide party. It’s all terribly sad.
Her sister wrote about in The San Diego Tribune. There’s assorted pics which show them all laughing and talking. It all looks like a glossy ad for assisted suicide. Which it is. Or maybe more like The Big Chill for the 21st century.
The woman who’d been suffering from that terrible disease wrote her sister in an email saying, “I don’t want to live out my life paralyzed, eating through a tube in my stomach and communicating through a machine. I’d rather be free than entombed in my body.”
Like I said, it’s all terribly sad.
But then the piece takes an odd turn. It takes an anti-Catholic turn. (Perhaps not so odd for the San Diego Tribune.)
A month before she asked me about Bitcoin, an aid-in-dying bill had stalled in the state Assembly’s health committee. Three of the six committee members, under pressure from the Catholic Church, and despite having watched parents die from a terminal illness, refused to support it.
(I grew up Catholic; I went to Catholic school where we were taught Jesus’ final words on the cross, when he could no longer take the suffering: “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit.” Tell me: How’s that not aid in dying?)
OK. Where do we even start?
She’s arguing that God assisted in Jesus’ suicide? Really?
It was now about the sixth hour and the sun’s light failed, so that darkness came over the whole land until the ninth hour.
45 The veil of the Sanctuary was torn right down the middle.
46 Jesus cried out in a loud voice saying, ‘Father, into your hands I commit my spirit.’ With these words he breathed his last. What about the torture and crucifixion of Jesus says suicide to this woman?
Committing yourself to accepting the will of God is the exact opposite of suicide.
But it gets even more curious:
Thanks to Assemblywoman Susan Eggman, the End of Life Option Act was resurrected in mid-August 2015, passed and signed into law by Gov. Jerry Brown the following month. Brown is Catholic, and many were unsure whether he’d sign the bill. In a poignant signing message explaining his decision, Brown wrote: “I do not know what I would do if I were dying in prolonged and excruciating pain. I am certain, however, that it would be a comfort to be able to consider the options afforded by this bill. And I wouldn’t deny that right to others.”
The law didn’t take effect until June 9 this year, but my sister was willing to wait so she could end her life safely and legally.
So the law of California was more important than her faith? Truly, this is an example of the state taking the place of the Church. This family was willing to go against the laws of the Church but not against Jerry Brown’s California state law. (He’s a Catholic, doncha’ know?)
I feel for this woman. My heart breaks for the family. ALS is a terrible disease. It’s one thing to do what this woman did but compounding it with attempting to convince others of its rightness and attacking the Catholic Church for teaching that every life is sacred seems egregious and misdirected.
