Alternatives to physician-assisted suicide often worse

By John Crisp

Thursday, June 25, 2015 | 2 a.m.

Brittany Maynard, 29, died Nov. 1. To be more accurate, she killed herself.

Last year, she was diagnosed with stage 4 glioblastoma, a malignant brain tumor, and was given six months to live. Because this disease would destroy her life long before her natural death, she left California — where physician-assisted suicide is illegal — and moved to Portland, Ore., which is in one of five states that allow some version of assistance in dying to patients who face an imminent death.

She didn’t want to die, but when it was clear her situation was hopeless, she wanted to take control over the circumstances of her death. She celebrated her husband’s birthday Oct. 26, then, on Nov. 1, she ingested a lethal, but legal, prescription and died quietly at a time and place of her choosing.

Maynard wanted to leave a legacy. Before she died, she issued an appeal to California legislators to legalize physician-assisted suicide, and in the last weeks of her life she discussed the issue with Gov. Jerry Brown. The California Senate recently responded by approving a bill — the End of Life Option Act — that represents a tentative first step toward that goal.

The complexities of this issue are embodied in questions and stories: Why do we expect loved ones to endure lingering, miserable deaths while we ensure our pets and serial killers die as free from pain as possible? How do we ensure that aid in dying isn’t misused by the temporarily depressed? How do we protect the elderly from manipulative, impatient heirs? Are we violating some divine mandate about the integrity of life by avoiding the suffering that often accompanies death?

And then there are the stories: Earlier this month, Annabelle Gurwitch described in The New York Times her efforts to help a friend find a peaceful exit from life rather than suffer a miserable death from pancreatic cancer. She and four of the patient’s closest friends assembled at her bedside, toasted her, said their goodbyes, then gave her a huge overdose — illegally; this was in California — from the patient’s collection of prescription drugs.

But Annabelle and her friends were amateurs, and in this gruesome tale their friend suffered much longer than she would have had her death occurred under the supervision of a physician.

Another story: In 2012, Barbara Wise suffered triple cerebral aneurysms and was bedridden in a Cleveland hospital. Her husband of 45 years, John, smuggled a pistol into the hospital and fired a single shot into her head. She died the next day.

Even though John Wise and his wife had agreed that neither wanted to live in a bedridden, disabled state, prosecutors charged the 66-year-old Wise with aggravated murder. In December 2013, he was sentenced to six years in prison.

Then there’s George Sanders, 86, whose wife begged him to kill her after she could no longer stand the pain and debilitation of multiple sclerosis.

Or Jean and Cecil Brush. After a marriage of six decades, they were still deeply in love. But as Cecil became increasingly debilitated by Alzheimer’s, blindness, hallucinations, incontinence and other maladies, in a lucid moment, the two of them agreed to a suicide pact. The first attempt was botched and Jean survived the second, so it was botched as well.

Stories like these are abundant, and as Baby Boomers age and modern medicine increases our capacity to prolong life, they’re likely to become more common. In themselves, they don’t make the case for physician-assisted suicide as much as they testify to the desperation experienced by families whose loved ones are beyond hope of anything more than a prolonged miserable death.

But perhaps they will also provoke us to begin a conversation about the quality of life as opposed to its length. We’re a nation that believes in personal freedom. But the ultimate freedom is exercising some control over when and how we die. That privilege could eliminate a great deal of unnecessary suffering and, perhaps, even alleviate some of our inherent fear of death.

John Crisp, a columnist for Tribune News Service, teaches in the English Department at Del Mar College in Corpus Christi, Texas.