Mary was a former church member. When I met her, she was enjoying her retired life after teaching at a school for many years. As snowbirds do here in Saskatchewan, she had spent many winters in Florida, US. She was a very faithful church member and actively involved in UCW (United Church Women). Mary was a very generous, faithful and kind person. But sometimes she was stubborn and tough on certain things.
One day I heard that she had directly been transported from Florida to a hospital near her home by an air-ambulance due to her kidney failure. When I visited her, she was taking dialysis treatment quite regularly. She told me that she didn't like this treatment. But she had taken it for a couple of months anyway.
In an early morning I got her phone call. Mary asked me if I could come to her during the morning. Entering into her condo-apartment, I was very surprised at her figure. She was sitting on her comfortable chair in white clothes with a blond wig. It seemed as if I were seeing an angel. Mary told me that she had a mystical experience the night before and felt that she was ready to go. How I should respond to her was puzzling.
Making a long story short, Mary asked me two important questions; 1) As a faithful Christian, is it a sin or not to request to stop dialysis and any further prolonging of her life through external support systems? 2) Was I okay to discuss her funeral service now? She did not want to live depending on prolong life support systems for the rest of her life. These were not only a fundamental human ethical question but also an imminent problem of how to be ready to die. It was an absolutely different issue from euthanasia, called assisted suicide to end one's life with other's help or assistance in fear of and to avoid from suffering before dying.
After a long, serious and frank discussion about the human destiny of life and death, Mary stated that she was ready to go to heaven. In the near future she would say to medical practitioners not to do any further treatment except physical pain control. A few weeks later her daughter called me saying that her mom officially requested to stop all kinds of prolonged life support treatments and thanked the hospital staffs with these words, "Party is over! Thank you very much everyone for helping me!"
If it is true, "Nobody wants to die but simply doesn't want to suffer," then why has euthanasia become an ongoing social issue? Who is able to help and assist to mitigate the emotional and spiritual suffering of dying? Whenever this sensitive issue of life and death becomes a social controversy, I think of Mary's choice. I was glad to assist her to choose a natural death to enter into eternal life when the time arrived, rather than to help by injecting poison into the body to commit suicide. Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945) said, "If you are not ready to die, you are not ready to live."
