‘It’s scary, and it knocks the breath out of you.”
Maggie Karner is not unrealistic or “romantic” about death and dying. She’s living it.
“It takes a long time to come to terms with a disease — especially a terminal illness. And then you start thinking; Okay, this is the new me. This is the new normal. And I can still appreciate every moment.”
When I co-hosted a National Review Institute panel on assisted suicide with Ryan T. Anderson of the Heritage Foundation earlier this spring, we began it with a video from Karner. No words of ours could be as compelling as her testimony.
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Maggie Karner is dying. She was diagnosed last April with brain cancer. After chemotherapy and radiation, the cancer cells are growing again. In the video, distributed by the Patients’ Rights Action Fund, she talks about her father — “my hero dad” — who had a severe spinal-cord injury toward the end of his life.
Karner isn’t spinning anything: His accident was devastating. He had become quadriplegic, after leading a very active life. “That was a really tough transition for him and for all of us,” she says. His family wondered how he “was going to exist without the use of his arms and legs.” They spent time with him, and he couldn’t do anything for them in return.
But “he settled in very gracefully,” Karner tells us. “And he realized the value of the words being spoken.”
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“We learned a lot. It was a gift that our Dad gave to us.” He showed her that the value of our lives doesn’t depend on what we can do. “I saw with my two eyes what joy can still be found in just valuing every moment. It doesn’t mean it’s going to be great. It doesn’t mean it is going to be romantic. But there are moments that need to be cherished.”
“He left us a legacy with the time that he gave us,” Karner explains. “He could have checked out right away and said, ‘I’m done with this.’” Instead, “My dad showed me not just how to live and how to do stuff and how to be productive. He showed me how to die with grace and dignity.”
Six out of ten Americans do not support assisted suicide, according to a new Marist poll commissioned by the Knights of Columbus, and a large majority — including people who believe assisted suicide should be legal — have deep concerns about it and the effect it will have on the practice of medicine and on life-affirming choices. This is so even despite the harrowing and deeply personal nature of the issues involved — the fear so many of us have of death and dying, the pain so many of us have suffered watching loved ones die. This, too, despite well-funded campaigns that insist that assisted suicide should be a free choice and that it is a matter of “mercy” and “dignity.”
But physician-assisted suicide is based on the lie that some lives are unworthy of life. That diagnosis is grave for health care in America.
“A commitment to never participate in assisted suicide is essential for the possibility of doctors’ continuing to care well for patients who are dying,” argued one of our panelists, Farr Curlin, the Josiah C. Trent professor of medical humanities at the Duke University School of Medicine. “The commitment to not kill our patients or help them kill themselves is an essential guard against the temptation to get rid of a patient’s suffering by getting rid of the patient.” He says the temptation is real for any doctor caring for the sick and dying. Honoring the principle of “First, do no harm” by rejecting physician-assisted suicide, he says, gives doctors “the freedom they need to aggressively and effectively treat the difficult symptoms that accompany terminal illnesses.” Dr. Curlin, who practices palliative medicine, needs to be able to stand before a patient and make a commitment to care for him without purposely hastening his death, and the patient and his family need to have trust in that commitment.
We “are either going to have effective palliative medicine for patients and good care, or we’re going to have maximum choice, including helping patients die,” Dr. Curlin asserts. “But we are not going to have both.” Why, when there’s broad agreement that “preserving and restoring a patient’s health is a good thing,” he asks, would we ever consider doing such harm? He points to his experience of seeing patients forgoing palliative care for fear that doctors have lowered their standards to the point where they will be likely to intentionally hasten death.
The Marist poll shows that very few Americans consider legalizing physician-assisted suicide a priority. So what are we doing considering it in almost 20 places this year? Why not instead address the needs Curlin is seeing?
A lot of the media coverage of assisted suicide, Sister Constance Veit points out, has profiled beautiful young women. But it’s the people her Little Sisters of the Poor serve in over 30 nations who are most affected by it — the elderly as they reach “the end of life’s journey.” These people prefer not to be hospitalized unless absolutely necessary. And when someone is dying, Sister Constance explains, “all the best is done for that person.” The Little Sisters bring out the best bed linens, saved for this time. There are flowers, soft music, and “human touches that make a difference.” Families are invited to stay around the clock. Family reconciliations often happen during this time, and “the room of a dying person almost becomes the spiritual center of our house at that point, for those intense days.”
What legacy will we leave here? Assisting the suicide of medicine or cherishing life, especially the lives of the weakest and most vulnerable?
— Kathryn Jean Lopez is senior fellow at the National Review Institute, editor-at-large of National Review Online, and founding director of Catholic Voices USA. This column is based on one available exclusively through Andrews McMeel Universal’s Newspaper Enterprise Association. The video of the National Review Institute/Heritage Foundation panel can be viewed here.