When Brittany Maynard took her own life on Nov. 1, it should have been a cause of great consternation among all who knew her. Instead it was viewed as a relief, as allowing her to make her own choice as to when to die.
Brittany had terminal brain cancer and moved from California to Oregon to take advantage of that state’s liberal assisted suicide law.
The Archbishop of Portland, Ore., Alexander Sample had urged Brittany not to give up on life. He offered “our love and compassion until the sacred moment when God calls you home.”
After Brittany’s death, Archbishop Sample said, “Cutting life short is not the answer to death.”
“Instead of hastening death, we encourage all to embrace the sometimes difficult but precious moments at the end of life, for it is often in these moments that we come to understand what is most important about life. Our final days help us to prepare for our eternal destiny.”
Contrast that story to the saga of Lauren Hill, a freshman basketball player at Mount St. Joseph College in Cincinnati.
Lauren, who has inoperable brain cancer, scored the first basket of the 2014-2015 season. She received a pass and then drove to the hoop for two points just 17 seconds into the game against Hiram College.
Usually the Mount’s girls games draw about 100 fans, but when Lauren’s story got out, there were 10,000 people in the stands at Xavier University, which volunteered to host the game when the demand for tickets became so large.
In fact, the game had been moved up two weeks in order to assure that Lauren would still be feeling well enough to play. After scoring, she went to the bench and didn’t return until the final minute, when she added two more points to her college stats.
The support of the community for Lauren’s zest for life has been overwhelming. In the same way, the larger community failed Brittany Maynard.
Instead of bolstering her hope and supporting her efforts to live, society told Brittany it was all right to hasten her death as if we humans have power over who lives and who dies.
“Killing oneself eliminates the freedom enjoyed in earthly life. True autonomy and true freedom come only when we accept death as a force beyond our control,” explained Archbishop Sample.
Assisted suicide legislation is a sign of the culture of death among us. It allows us to play God with matters that are beyond our ability to control. It is interference with God’s plan.
The Church’s teaching that all life is sacred from the moment of conception to the second of natural death should be our guiding principle.
It reminds us of Sister Juliet who recently left the Brooklyn Diocese to go home to Nigeria to die. She was a pastoral minister at St. Joseph’s Co-Cathedral parish in Prospect Heights. When her diagnosis was terminal, she decided she wanted to go home to be surrounded by her family.
Some members of her Brooklyn parish community pulled out all the stops to get her on a flight to Lagos and a connecting flight home, where she lived for only two weeks.
She was in love with life and was hoping for a miracle that she might continue to serve God. She received a miracle of a different kind – the miracle of eternal life.
She died on Nov. 1, the same day as Brittany – sharply different approaches to how we live our lives and face our deaths.