The evening that the Illinois General Assembly voted to legalize physician assisted suicide, my mother spent the night at our home. It was Halloween 2025. We shared dinner with friends. Laughed. Took what would be our last family photo together. Then all went to sleep, eager for the rest of the weekend visit with Grammie. Mom had been a relatively healthy 91-year-old. We used to say she was made of upper Michigan farm stock. “Strong like bull.” It was a family joke.
Mom woke on November 1 a changed person. The abrupt cognitive changes, the inability to walk or stand, the memory loss, were, after an ER visit, diagnosed as effects of two highly aggressive brain tumors. Doctors estimated
six more weeks of life. They overestimated by two weeks.
In the last month, she lived in the hospital and then a nursing home. Early on, I asked her if she knew what was happening to her. At various times she did and did not, but each time, after I stated or affirmed her condition, she would look into my eyes with her eyes of joy. She would state something like: “I will see Jesus.”
We can always witness in our lives. My mother who was a great evangelizer in her prime, never shirking from talking about the love of Jesus, witnessed even in her dying.
Progressively, her mind left the present and rooted itself in her childhood on the farm. Other nursing home residents did not know
that her family barn with the horses was housed in the parking lot. During her final weeks, she lived in a time where her joy was riding the
one bike shared by seven children pell-mell down the gravel driveway. This brought me much comfort.
Had my mother held out one more year, had her diagnosis come at a time when she could have chosen physician-assisted suicide, I do not know what she would have thought. Because she was a devout follower of Christ, I believe she would have pushed the choice away with horror and disgust.
People who choose physician assisted suicide as a means of death do not do so on average out of suffering or fear of pain. Fears that rule instead are losing autonomy, no longer enjoying life, loss of dignity, losing control of bodily functions, or becoming a burden on family, friends, and caregivers.
My mother, my family — we experienced these in the last month of her life, but not all of these. My mother’s dignity never left her. Her dignity was inherent, God-given, independent of her age and stage of life, independent of her abilities or disabilities. Nor was my mother a burden to us as her body failed.
“Loss of dignity” and “becoming a burden” are judgments placed upon a person or situation by a culture devoid of love. The lesson here is love. The autonomy was flipped. The mother who bore three totally dependent babies was loved in her total dependence by those grown babies fully possessing autonomy. The lesson
of families is that when autonomy is not possible, love is.
Allowing our fellow human beings to choose ending their lives early is the true robber of dignity, the ultimate end of autonomy, and the rejection of loving and being loved. Dying is hard, ugly, and heartbreaking. It can also be faith-filled, beautiful, and life affirming.
We must all learn better how to live well and die well, in the manner of Christ Jesus.
