Inspired by an unnamed American science fiction writer, Lewis borrows and develops the idea that Heaven as a spiritual world is more ‘real’ than Earth; the flora, fauna, and inhabitants of Heaven overwhelm the senses with their glory and human beings by contrast are relatively insubstantial. Lewis travels through the heavenly country as a character in his own story and describes such experiences as walking over blades of grass which hurt and pierce his feet; a mere leaf is so heavy it’s impossible for him to lift. At one point, he finds himself walking on top of a small stream (!) in his search for a more comfortable, if less efficient, pathway through the forested valley.

As he wanders, he observes and overhears many conversations between the Bright People (the citizens of the heavenly valley) and the ghostlike beings with whom he rode into the country on an ordinary-looking city bus. The Bright People have come to meet their friends and relatives, whom they try to convince to make a further journey with them “to the mountains” (to Heaven proper, perhaps). Their dialogue, remonstrations, and arguments make up the bulk of the narrative. I recognized amongst the bus passengers quite a few people that I feel I know personally: 1) the Big Ghost who meets one of his former earthly ‘partners in crime’ and is incensed that God’s view of ultimate justice differs from his own; 2) the Bishop Ghost who plays at theological games and can’t be bothered with anything so simple as childlike faith; 3) the Hard-Bitten Ghost, a depressed pessimist with his head sunk in conspiracy theories and an allergy to responsible engagement with the world; 4) two female Ghosts who have spent their earthly lives attempting to control their loved ones and who take offense that God will not ultimately give them ‘possession’ of others’ wills and souls; and 5) the Tragedian, a soul in two bodies who attempts (and fails) to blackmail his former lover with his pain and suffering.

Each of these characters, including Lewis, struggles to decide whether to trust the heavenly citizens’ testimony of the goodness of God, His justice, and His love. Each visitor’s encounter with his or her transformed loved one challenges the way in which he/she had framed his/her human experience on Earth. Lewis listens and watches as each one insists on Heaven on his/her own terms, and each one ultimately turns away from Truth in the form of a renewed, glorified relationship with the Bright Person. The humility required to trust in the witnesses of Glory and to undergo the transformation necessary to stay and live in the valley proves to be too high a price to pay.

I first read The Great Divorce about 15 years ago, before my conversion (from evangelicalism) to the Catholic faith. I remember marveling at Lewis’ creativity and masterful dialogue, and at that time, I couldn’t resist interpreting his mentions of Heaven and Hell in a literal, allegorical fashion. I was very concerned about correct theology in my Protestant days (looking through the ‘Bible-only’ lens, of course), and Lewis’ portrayal of some in-between place (Purgatory? *Gasp!) put me off. I remember enjoying it as a fantasy, but I don’t recall the book having challenged or changed me in any way. 

However, I recently joined a literary study group whose focus is the writings of the Inklings (early 20^th century English writers C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Dorothy Sayers, Charles Williams, and Owen Barfield among others), and together we recently reread and discussed The Great Divorce. At the same time, in my Communion & Liberation School of Community, we’re reading Father Luigi Giussani’s Is It Possible to Live This Way?[iii], and Fr. Giussani’s keen insights have illumined Lewis’ fantastical images for me in surprising and challenging ways.

Fr. Giussani writes that of the two ways of gaining knowledge (1: empirical observation/sensory input and 2: indirect knowledge through a mediator, i.e. through persons, parents, teachers, books, etc.), it is indirect knowledge, i.e. that which comes to us through trust in a witness, which is at the core of human culture and foundational to our existence: “Listen, what’s more important: the evidence or this knowledge mediated through a witness? Get rid of this knowledge through mediation and you wipe out all human culture, all of it, because all human culture is based on the fact that one person begins with what another person has discovered and then goes forward from there. If you couldn’t reasonably do this, the ultimate representation of reason, which is culture, couldn’t exist… Culture, history, and society are based on this type of knowledge called faith, knowledge through faith, indirect knowledge, knowledge of reality though the mediation of a witness“[iv] (emphasis mine). 

Fr. Giussani thus radically reorganizes the categories of the faith vs. reason debate. Since faith is the foundation of our knowledge about the world, faith is the most reasonable choice to make when evaluating the testimony of someone you know and trust — especially if the encounter is exceptional in some way. He continues: “From a rational point of view, it’s clear that if you become certain that another person knows what he or she is saying and doesn’t want to deceive, then logically you should trust, because if you don’t trust you go against yourself, against the judgment you formulated that that person knows what he or she says and doesn’t want to deceive you.”[v] For Lewis’ fellow bus travelers to the heavenly valley, faith is actually the most reasonable response to the extraordinary encounters they are having, but in denying and rejecting the new vision, the visitors are acting in a most tragically irrational, unreasonable way. The human bond of trust they had with their now Bright friend or loved one should have enabled them to trust the information they were receiving and to allow themselves to be led by that love and trust into the mountains. But alas — they could not overcome their pride, their bitterness, their greed — that is, their insistence that Heaven’s infinite glory conform to their finite conceptions. And they go against themselves.

Fr. Giussani writes that as each one of us encounters Jesus Christ, we must respond in faith to Him — not because His holiness or glory demand it, but because our reasonable faculties demand it, since He created us for a destiny of eternal happiness with Him: “The only rational thing is the ‘yes’. Why? Because the reality that is proposed corresponds to the nature of our heart more than any of our images. It corresponds to our thirst for happiness, which constitutes the reason for living, the nature of our ‘I’, the need for truth and happiness. Indeed, Christ corresponds to this more than does any image we can construct.”[vi] Fr. Giussani and Lewis certainly agree that Christianity is not about dull, enforced conformity to arbitrary rules that abrogate our freedom; on the contrary, the Christian life is a relationship filled with joy and love, an exercise of our free choice based on reason.

The final encounter Lewis describes in The Great Divorce is with the glorified soul of George MacDonald, a Christian fantasy writer of the previous generation whom Lewis deeply admired. Lewis puts his most profound words into MacDonald’s mouth, and he explains the entire vision of the book thus:

… [B]oth good and evil, when they are full grown, become retrospective. Not only this valley but all their earthly past will have been Heaven to those who are saved. Not only the twilight in the town, but all their life on Earth too, will then be seen by the damned to have been Hell. That is what mortals misunderstand. They say of some temporal suffering, “No future bliss can make up for it,” not knowing that Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory. And of some sinful pleasure they say “Let me have but this and I’ll take the consequences”: little dreaming how damnation will spread back and back into their past and contaminate the pleasure of the sin. Both processes begin even before death. The good man’s past begins to change so that his forgiven sins and remembered sorrows take on the quality of Heaven: the bad man’s past already conforms to his badness and is filled only with dreariness. And that is why, at the end of all things, when the sun rises here and the twilight turns to blackness down there, the Blessed will say ‘We have never lived anywhere except in Heaven’, and the Lost, “We were always in Hell.” And both will speak truly.[vii]

Our eternal life in Christ doesn’t begin when we die; St. Paul says that God “chose us in [Christ] before the foundation of the world” (Ephesians 1:4). Christian faith and hope aren’t pie-in-the-sky wishful thinking; they constitute here-and-now “evidence of things not seen” (Hebrews 11:1) which “does not disappoint” (Romans 5:5). Who we are and how we live determines our destiny; at the same time, our destiny determines who we are and how we live. The choice between Heaven and Hell faces us every moment of the day. May God grant each of us the courage to put our faith in the witness of Jesus and His Spirit: “When the Advocate comes whom I will send you from the Father, the Spirit of truth that proceeds from the Father, he will testify to me. And you also testify, because you have been with me from the beginning” (John 15:26-27).

[v] Giussani, p. 24.

[vi] Giussani, p. 39.

[vii] Lewis, p. 69.

Although all those things describe a believer's behavior, the Christian faith for me was more an intellectual thing than a true lifestyle, a true way of being.  The experience described below is one of the doorways God provided for me to begin to understand how certain pieces of the Catholic way of life — spirit, soul, flesh, and the practice of good that results in holiness and peace — fit together.

In 1999, about 6 months after I became a Catholic, St. Therese of Lisieux's relics were touring the world.  She made a stop at a church near me called St. Joseph's in Vancouver WA, and I went up there to — I don't know, really — see her?  See what all the fuss was about, maybe.  Receive a blessing in a new sort of way, I hoped.

I drove up there (about half an hour's ride from Portland on the freeway) and stood in line outside the church for over an hour.  It was November; very cold and sprinking a little, but not raining hard, thank God.  I was standing next to two old ladies, and we struck up a conversation.  We talked for half an hour before we realized we were part of the same parish!  They were sweet and wonderful; sisters, one was widowed, but they were obviously very close.  They told me some about St. Therese, since I didn't know much of her story, and they gave me a pamphlet and a holy card with her picture.

We finally got inside the church, and it was a big, long procession, a line filing down the aisle to the front and past the reliquary (a dark-colored wooden trunk) which contained her bones, and then up the far aisle and out again.  At various positions around the sanctuary, there were Knights of Columbus standing at attention and watching everything, guiding people around, and handing out single-stem roses.  I had heard of these folks, but I had never seen them do anything besides serve pancakes in the church fellowship hall before.  Here, they were all cleaned up and decked out in their full regalia — tailcoats, white shirts, colored sashes, ceremonial swords, and huge black Napoleon-shaped hats with colored plumes.  It almost looked weird and costumey, but then I realized that in this little world, the spiritual reality created by this strange intersection of history, mourning, hope, the sacred space, and the imagination, these guys were providing security for a visiting dignitary.  Ah.  The impression that settled on me was like the one you get at a really great "Roadside America" homespun tourist attraction — all the art, all the stuff, all the spectacle just bursts forth so honestly from the love of human hearts, you can't help but respect it, even if it seems tacky or bizarre at first glance.

Anyway, I slowly made my way up toward her.  As I approached, I saw people take things like medals, jewelry, papers, and pictures and press them up against the glass museum case that enclosed the reliquary.  All I could think of was the flower I'd been given by one of the Knights, and though I didn't really know the protocol for this sort of thing, I supposed it'd be okay if I just touched that to the glass.  (Looking back on it, I think anything I would have done would have been fine; it was people's personal expressions of devotion that they were enacting, after all.)

I arrived at the reliquary and stared at it for a moment, and then gingerly touched my flower to the glass.  I wondered if I'd miraculously be able to see inside, or if I'd hear her speak to me (with the answers to all my problems) in the same sort of way that I hear Jesus' voice in my heart, or what.  Nothing, except a small sense of excitement and warmth, like when you shake a celebrity's hand and say "I love your work", and you do sense a sincerity in their manner and response, but they're busy, after all, and there are so many other people…

If I could put the blessing I received into words, I think it came most from the way it led me to meditation on the Incarnation.  Here were the bones of a person who suffered and was made holy by God, a true temple of the Holy Spirit.  This didn't go away after her spirit left her body; she was somehow still there — a presence, a will, an intention. The holiness and integrity that Christ had given her somehow imprinted and soaked into those bones, leaving a spiritual aroma that attracted us all, that we sensed as we gathered in faith to honor her.  If I heard words from her in my heart, I guess they were, "Thanks for coming.  It's nice to meet you."  She seems to be someone who's willing to travel with those who suffer and wants to make a difference in people's lives, even after she's been dead almost 80 years.

Sometimes I pity those who know Jesus but don't realize the wealth of friendship and support we have through the heart of Christ in the communion of saints.  Then I realize, that never stopped the saints from loving us before.  It doesn't stop them now.  It can't; it never will.

But It All Sounds So Sensible

I studied it thoroughly — not just because I have an interest in issues like these, but because I have an interest in California as well. Unlike some Oregonians who sport nasty bumper stickers about urban sprawl and the northward migration of a few of your citizens over the years, I like California. I was born in San Diego and lived there until I was almost four, and then in my twenties, I spent 18 months working for a record company in Newport Beach before moving back to Portland in 1992. California is a rich cultural treasure trove and an undeniably beautiful place. And, being a musician and actor, I’ve always felt a kinship with the southern California subculture, admiring its influence while smiling at its artifice.

Physician-assisted suicide, however, is a deadly serious subject. I want to take this opportunity to tell you what it’s like to live in a state where it’s legal (and somehow noble) to kill yourself for certain “acceptable” reasons. Right-to-die advocates present a picture of pain-wracked, horribly suffering people experiencing smooth, easy deaths following a foolproof medical consent and evaluation process. In reality, it’s not this way, and there are no guarantees that the process or the “safeguards” will work.

By now, you’ve all heard of the DWDA and its sensible-sounding requirements: a terminal illness, six months to live, three requests (one in writing), a second concurring medical opinion, self-administration of the drug overdose, no lethal injections. Over the past seven years that Oregon’s DWDA has been in effect, every single one of these walls against abuse has been breached.

Contrary to the assurances of “safeguards” and “monitoring,” here follows the chilling reality: Consider the case of Mrs. Kate Cheney, an elderly Oregon woman with unfortunate diagnoses of both dementia and cancer. Dr. Thomas Pitre in his article “Lessons from Oregon” (The Linarce Quarterly, May 2004), chronicles the events:

[Mrs. Cheney’s] daughter accompanied [Mrs. Cheney] to her doctor’s appointment to formally request assisted suicide under Oregon’s new law allowing such a practice; the doctor did not agree with that course of action. It was the daughter, not the patient, who then insisted the mother have a new doctor within her health maintenance organization, Kaiser Permanente. The doctor change for the mother was granted to the daughter.

This second doctor was willing to give Mrs. Cheney assisted suicide and arranged for psychiatric evaluation, because it was standard procedure at this health maintenance organization (HMO) in its assisted-suicide protocol. The psychiatrist, who released a written report to the newspaper, found that Mrs. Cheney had short-term memory deficits and dementia. He also said the assisted-suicide request appeared to be the daughter’s “agenda.” The daughter, who also accompanied Mrs. Cheney to this appointment, “coached her” in her answers, even when the psychiatrist asked her not to do so. The psychiatrist said, “[Mrs. Cheney] does not seem to be explicitly pushing for this.” She was deemed lacking sufficient capacity to weigh options about assisted suicide; thus, she was not eligible for doctor-assisted suicide. The patient accepted this assessment. Her daughter, however, “became angry.”

It was the daughter, not the patient, who then “decided on a second competency evaluation.” Kaiser HMO apparently authorized this second off-panel mental health evaluation. This new psychologist admitted that the patient could not even remember when she was diagnosed with terminal cancer, although it had only been within the last three months. She also wrote that the patient’s “choices may be influenced by her family’s wishes and her daughter, Erika, may be somewhat coercive.” Nevertheless, she approved the assisted suicide.

With two conflicting mental health opinions, the final decision, far from being an “autonomous” decision made in “private” by the patient, came down to yet another Kaiser HMO doctor-administrator, Robert Richardson, who approved giving a lethal overdose to this elderly woman under pressure from her family.

This is no scare-tactics fantasy; this was thoroughly and publicly documented. Safeguards were meaningless in this case. This incident shows that if someone wants assisted suicide badly enough, or if they want it for someone else badly enough, any barrier can be got around. After all, this is about personal autonomy, isn’t it? If you want something, no law can stand in your way — right?

The official documents describing the Oregon Health Plan (Oregon’s version of Medicaid) clearly indicate the funding priorities of the state, placing “end of life care” (which now includes assisted suicide) above “community mental health.” This means that if you have the misfortune to be both terminally ill and poor, the state’s health care bureaucracy will most likely consider paying for your overdose of pentobarbital before your prescription for Prozac. (I note that your own state legislators have attempted some similarly motivated sleight-of-hand with AB 651, a bill originally designed to provide health care to the poor but now more reflective of the pro-suicide lobby’s priorities.)

Speaking of suicide drugs, according to the 2004 Oregon Department of Human Services Death With Dignity annual report, pentobarbital is the most popular drug used in assisted suicide. This drug is available only in a liquid form designed for injection. This raises a question: Are people really shooting themselves up, or is this drug being purposely misprescribed by doctors who support PAS and being taken orally? (The Oregon DWDA specifies that the patient must be able to swallow the medication.) The report also notes that secobarbital (brand name Seconal) was used for several 2004 assisted suicides. However, Seconal was not being manufactured in this country during much of that year and was difficult to obtain even with a prescription. Where did all these people get it? The DHS report seems to raise more questions than it answers when examined closely.

Complications and Uncertainties

As with any medical procedure, complications have sometimes arisen. (For the purpose of our discussion, a “complication” means that the patient didn’t die as expected.) When problems are reported, they usually reflect the inconsistent effects of the lethal medication dosage. For example, The Oregonian reported that in January of this year, David E. Prueitt, a 42-year-old man with lung cancer, downed the contents of 100 Seconal capsules mixed with applesauce and water, expecting to end his life. He was comatose for nearly three days. When he awakened, he spoke the following choice words: “What the hell happened? Why am I not dead?” He wisely decided, along with his family, not to try again; he died a natural (one might say dignified) death two weeks later.

An earlier case concerns Patrick Matheny, who in 1999 lived on the southern Oregon coast and suffered from amyotropic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a neurological disorder. He received his lethal prescription via mail order, and since nothing in the Oregon law requires medical personnel to be present during the assisted suicide, he did his best to concoct the potion properly and drink it on his own. However, one of the difficulties caused by ALS is trouble with swallowing. As The Oregonian reported the story, his brother-in-law indicated that Mr. Matheny was ultimately unable to self-administer the medication and had to be “helped” to die. To this day, no one knows what “help” he was given; no official reporting was required, the family’s not talking, and Mr. Matheny’s body was cremated the next day. Don’t be fooled; the secrecy that the DWDA promised to dispel is still quite thick.

Doctors in the Netherlands, who have had the most experience with this sort of thing, estimate that “complications” occur in up to 20% of assisted suicide cases. This is why they rely on the availability of lethal injection. (Of course, the Dutch are involuntarily euthanizing handicapped children now — but we’re too civilized to do that.) We’re just lucky that Mr. Matheny’s relatives didn’t sue the state for discrimination based on the Americans with Disabilities Act, due to Mr. Matheny’s inability to swallow. Thus, Oregon teeters on the edge, just one court case away from legalizing lethal injection. Here’s what you call “the money quote” from an Oregon doctor, Peter Rasmussen, who has been involved in numerous assisted suicides: “I think all involved in the Oregon law must recognize that we are on a slippery slope, and we have to be careful with every step. But, just because it's a slippery slope doesn't mean we shouldn't go there.” That wind we Oregonians feel in our faces isn’t the one coming down from Mt. Hood through the Columbia Gorge; it’s from our momentum as we slide further and further.

Also, let me warn you that if you ever are given a chance to vote on this issue in a general election, you will endure an avalanche of local TV and radio campaign commercials touting the “compassionate” and “loving” choice of assisted suicide. As you do, remember the artifice of Hollywood I mentioned earlier. During the 1994 campaign to legalize PAS in Oregon, a television commercial was aired featuring Patty Rosen, RN. She told the heartbreaking story of her decision to help her daughter, who was dying of thyroid cancer, to die via an overdose of illegally-obtained medication. In the ad, she said that her daughter died peacefully from the lethal overdose. However, three days before the election, it was discovered that Ms. Rosen hadn’t told the truth; her daughter did not die from the drug overdose, but from a lethal injection Ms. Rosen administered. Again, this is the reality of assisted suicide on the ground. Amidst the rhetoric of “compassion”, make sure to fact-check what the campaigns feed you.

Besides the uncertainties involved in administering assisted suicide, many terminally ill people don’t seem to cooperate with their six-month prognoses; some have improved and lived for years, and some have worsened suddenly and died within days. Studies have shown that when doctors make such determinations, they are wrong up to 40% of the time. When my own mother-in-law was dying of cancer in 2004, various health professionals and family members made wildly divergent predictions of her future. The wisest words that I heard at that time were spoken by a doctor whom I know well, a retired psychiatrist familiar with physicians’ habits and quirks. He told me, “The closer a person is to death, the less the doctors know.”

Depressed, Disabled, Disposable

Oregon PAS supporters make much of the fact that there has not been a “rush” of terminally ill people to commit suicide, as some opponents had feared. The annual report on physician-assisted suicide published by the Oregon Department of Human Services states that the number of cases actually decreased in 2004 compared to previous years; there were 37 assisted suicides in 2004 compared to 42 in 2003, and 60 lethal prescriptions written in 2004 compared to 68 in 2003. This has been cited in multiple press outlets to allay fears of that slippery slope. However, one fact in the report you’re not likely to hear from PAS supporters is that referrals for psychological evaluations for these suicide-minded people have also sharply decreased. In 1998, the first full year of legalization of assisted suicide in Oregon, the Department of Human Services reported that of the 15 people who died that year as a result of PAS, four had been referred for psychological evaluation. Last year, of the 37 people who committed suicide in this way, only two were given psychological referrals. This supposed safeguard is crumbling fast because 1) suicide-minded patients are beginning to seek out doctors whom they know to be assisted-suicide advocates; 2) these few physicians are writing a disproportionate number of lethal prescriptions; and 3) these physicians, because of their philosophical stance, don’t recognize their patients’ depressive symptoms as indications of a need for psychiatric care.

Dr. Peter Rasmussen (quoted above) was one of the plaintiffs in Oregon’s successful lawsuit to preserve assisted suicide in the face of Attorney General John Ashcroft’s 2001 ruling against it, and he has written several lethal prescriptions since the law took effect. In a recent interview with American Medical News (the newletter of the American Medical Association), Dr. Rasmussen states, “In my practice as an oncologist and palliative care physician, most of my patients are exhibiting some signs and symptoms of depression because many of these overlap with being terminally ill.” In other words, he regards psychiatric indicators of depression, including the wish to die, as normal for someone with terminal illness. Yet, he insists that his practice is “not a prescription mill” and that “most oncologists and people who spend a lot of time with the terminally ill are getting good at picking up clinical depression.” He regards his own informal judgment as adequate in the matter, despite the fact that he is not a licensed psychologist or psychiatrist as the law requires, and despite the fact that the Oregon Death With Dignity Guidebook for Health Care Professionals recommends that all patients inquiring about physician-assisted suicide be referred for psychological evaluation.

Beck’s Depression Inventory is a standard questionnaire used by psychiatrists and psychologists in evaluating patients for clinical depression. Its list of depression symptoms includes thoughts or plans of suicide. This reflects basic principles of psychology which insist that a wish to die is not a neutral or normal thought, though it often coincides with times of great personal stress or loss. Suicidal thoughts are a sign of depression, and if they appear in combination with other symptoms and persist over a long period of time, they are a strong indicator of clinical depression. Clinical (or major) depression is a severe mood disorder caused by an imbalance of brain chemicals, often corrected successfully with strong psychoactive drugs. (This is different than the less severe, temporary, situation-based type of depression which is often intermixed with the grieving process and improves with talk therapy or simply the passage of time for adjustment.) In any case, from a psychiatric point of view, thoughts and plans of suicide are part of a temporary or at least treatable emotional disorder; they are, at the root, irrational. In all of the psychiatric literature from Freud to the present, there has never been proposed any such thing as a rational wish to die — until now. To date, assisted suicide advocates have never addressed the fact that the “right to die,” as they conceive it, is a brand-new philosophical construct that contradicts 100 years of established psychological theory.

The Oregon law incorporates another supposed safeguard — a 15-day waiting period between the first request for lethal medication (three are required) and receipt of the prescription. According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Health Disorders, Fourth Edition (DSM–IV) and Beck’s Depression Inventory, 15 days is barely enough time for a mental health professional to fully assess the character of a patient’s depressive symptoms. Also, it’s nowhere near enough time for an ordinary person to take in and adjust to a doctor’s sad prognosis regarding his/her terminal or chronic illness. No one pretends that cancer, ALS, and multiple sclerosis aren’t the frightening, debilitating, and painful conditions that they are. However, it does take time to weigh the options for palliative care and treatment, to evaluate the success or failure of such options, and to fully consider the meaning of one’s life in the context of family, spirituality, and community. Considering the wealth of every human lifetime, a mere two weeks is not enough time for making a decision and arrangements to throw it all away.

Those people who pursue physician-assisted suicide in Oregon are asked to fill out a questionnaire as part of the reporting process and to indicate on it their reasons for choosing to die. The issues of “loss of autonomy” and “loss of ability to participate in activities that make life enjoyable” consistently top their list of concerns. Consider, though, all the different types of situations in which a person may find himself or herself without “autonomy” (however defined) or the ability to engage in pleasurable activities. A two-year-old girl has quite limited autonomy in terms of self-determination and decision-making; is such a state unbearable for her? A prison inmate is prevented from associating with former colleagues and can no longer engage in the life- or property-destroying activities he once did — can he not choose to do other things? When we enter into stages of life in which our need for others’ support and care is great, or greater than before, does our dependence cause an automatic decrease in our dignity as human beings?

In his famous sermon, John Donne said, “No man is an island”; supporters of assisted suicide seem firmly to believe the opposite. They regard any need for others to care for them as the greatest horror, the greatest cause of suffering, to be avoided at any cost. This raises the question: Can this sort of “suffering” really be avoided? Does such a radically self-reliant attitude actually improve our society, or does it in fact diminish us as a human community?

Disability rights groups (such as the one cheerily named Not Dead Yet) boldly carry the banner against assisted suicide, and this is the reason: They deal every day with personal issues of loss of autonomy, loss of control of bodily functions, loss of former physical or mental abilities, and many others. And yet, they insist that their lives are worth living. They insist that they are dignified human beings. Every time someone sounds off using the media’s megaphone with some version of “I wouldn’t want to live in that state,” it’s as if that person had walked up to a wheelchair-bound or mentally ill person on the street and said right to his or her face, “You know, don’t you think you'd be better off dead?” This is compassion?

So, my California friends, now it’s your turn to debate the pros and cons of assisted suicide — in the newspaper and local news, in Sacramento and at your neighborhood Starbucks. You’re now armed with knowledge and experience that we in Oregon didn’t have when we started this experiment. I hope you won’t follow us into the dark.

© Copyright 2005 Catholic Exchange

Kathleen Lundquist lives in Portland, Oregon. After journeying through many forms of Protestantism, she and her husband Gary were confirmed in the Catholic Church in 1999. She is a musician and songwriter as well as an author of poetry and essays on art, music, popular culture, and life issues.