Saturday, March 22, 1997

Learning how to die an increasingly important subject

By Tom Schaefer

Knight-Ridder Newspapers

Learning how to die is becoming as important as learning how to live, especially as we find out that, along with life choices, we have death choices.

Or so we think.

For example, we think about a doctor ending our suffering and pain, but the rules don't allow it. Now it turns out that the rules may be changing. A palliative, though paradoxical, procedure is being touted as a humane and sensible way to end suffering for the terminally ill.

It's called physician-assisted suicide.

With the correct dosage of deadly medicines, we supposedly will be able, as Woody Allen has said, to run not walk through the valley of the shadow of death.

Finally, we will control our own destinies and die with dignity. Who could ever deny such a request?

We may soon find out.

Sometime in June, the U.S. Supreme Court is expected to rule on whether terminally ill people have the right to end their lives with the aid of a physician.

Today, physicians, health-care workers, members of the clergy, lawyers and others are wrestling with this and other death-related issues at the third annual Health Ethics Conference at Wichita State University.

"Facing Death: A Living Choice" frames the points that speakers, panelists and other presenters will discuss. Timothy Quill, a physician whose challenge of a New York law banning assisted suicide is before the Supreme Court, is a featured speaker. He also contends that, regardless of the court's decision, this so-called "secret practice" will continue, although he says "an open practice ... would be actually safer for patients, more predictable, reassuring in many ways."

Quill's viewpoint seems to have support. A Louis Harris poll last year found that more than 70 percent of those surveyed said they approve of physician-assisted suicide.

So if public opinion approves of the practice, why shouldn't we press ahead and allow the terminally ill to choose the time and method of their death? The arguments in favor are compelling, but there's a factor that can't be ignored: We are created to live - and die - in a relationship with God, who makes the rules and sets the limits for life and death. And it is only in the absence of that belief that arguments for physician-assisted suicide become more credible.

Here's what's at stake:

If death is simply a natural process in the cycle of life, then how we control the process is ours alone to decide - from the beginning of life to its end. As attitudes about death adjust to popular opinion, laws can be changed to suit individual needs. And that, in fact, is the direction we're heading.

But if death is unnatural, a destroyer of what we were created to be in fellowship with the One who created us - then we must daily evaluate our lives in light of who we are and whose we are.

"As a hart longs for flowing streams, so longs my soul for thee, O God," the psalmist exclaims. We are spiritual beings made to live connected with God. Yet, we also are physical creatures who belong to a world of space, time and matter.

Dying brings to an end all that we have - our possessions, our joy in creation's beauty, our unrealized dreams - and all that we love - spouse, children, relatives and friends. More important, it rips the fabric of our being, threatening to separate our soul from its deepest longing communion with God.

How can we endure both the physical and spiritual pain of death?

Shortly before his death last fall, Cardinal Joseph Bernardin of Chicago wrote about the need to share burdens. His best seller, "The Gift of Peace," is his personal account of struggling against false charges of molestation leveled against him in 1993, reconciling with his accuser a year later, facing a diagnosis of pancreatic cancer in 1995 and, as death approached, finding comfort in the gift of peace.

Bernardin saw dying as an opportunity to minister to others - and to be ministered to. During his trips to the hospital for treatment, he visited a young mother who had a severe form of leukemia and later sat with her children at their mother's wake. He got to know a little girl named Amanda who also had leukemia and who kept up a correspondence with Bernardin ("the pope man," as she called him) until his death. And there were hundreds of others.

Just as he learned how to live with grace, he also learned how to die in peace.

"What I would like to leave behind is a simple prayer that each of you may find what I have found God's special gift to us all: the gift of peace.

"When we are at peace, we find the freedom to be most fully who we are, even in the worst of times. We let go of what is non-essential and embrace what is essential. We empty ourselves so that God may more fully work within us. And we become instruments in the hands of the Lord."

For people of faith, those can be humane and sensible rules for facing death. And ones that we can live - and die - with.