Friday of the Seventh Week of Easter

Amen, amen, I say to you, when you were younger,

you used to dress yourself and go where you wanted; 
but when you grow old, you will stretch out your hands,
and someone else will dress you
and lead you where you do not want to go.”
He said this signifying by what kind of death he would glorify God.
And when he had said this, he said to him, “Follow me.”

It is not hard to hear Jesus’ words to Peter addressed to each of us, “When you grow old…” Old is a lot older than it used to be. Some of us can expect to see one hundred years, and perhaps a third of our life in retirement. And we’ll probably suffer a quarter of that life with chronic health problems. Many of us will not know our final years as dementia and Alzheimer’s make their rude demands upon us. Someone else will dress us and lead us where we don’t want to go. Fortunate ones will be led by affectionate members of our family but many will be overseen by strangers.

Doctor Jack Kevorkian died a week ago today. You remember he promoted the practice of physician assisted suicide. As appalling as his crusade was, the “heresy” did what heresies should do -- it spurned the nation to seek a deeper wisdom. The New York Times said of him:

His stubborn and often intemperate advocacy for the right of the terminally ill to choose how they die is widely credited with sparking a boom in hospice care in the United States, and with making physicians more sympathetic to their pain and more willing to prescribe medication to relieve it.

I saw that dilemma in 1996 and 1997 when I was a hospital chaplain in Minnesota. Doctors would not talk to their patients and the families about the eminence of death. Their policy was to surrender no one to death unless she had less than a five percent chance of survival. Dying patients endured many intrusive procedures and outrageously expensive experiments before arriving beneath that 5% point. I personally knew two patients in ICU for six and eight months; neither had any realistic hope of recovery when they arrived in the hospital.

Dying patients were like those who had a rope died about their waists and were led where they did not want to go. They endured many months in a “no man’s land” between life and death. We heard their cries for help but we could neither pull them back to safety nor release them to the mercy of God. Given that predicament, inevitably, some patients demanded the “right to die with dignity.” Frankly I wondered what I would do in such a predicament.

Today the state of Oregon permits a type of “physician-assisted suicide” but few people have obtained permission to use it, and even fewer actually do so. They are apparently comforted by the availability of the poisons should they need to use them.

The Catholic Church opposed the Hemlock Society’s initiative to promote physician-assisted suicide; and, in the meantime, the hospice movement developed more humane ways to approach death. During the past three years I have often visited with patients and their families in the hospice unit at the VA Hospital and very often read to them the Church’s “Commendation of the Dying.” Occasionally I have asked them to “Say hello to my Mom and Dad!” and they readily agreed.

Most of us can expect to die peacefully. We pray for a happy death with a reasonable expectation that it will be a solemn and beautiful experience. In the meantime we live each day ready to make sacrifices and die to self. We remain open to God’s mercy and willing to pursue every graceful opportunity.