Euthanasia: a controversial issue, a misunderstood sentiment and a concept I have strongly supported throughout my short life, more passionately now than ever.
On the surface, such an idea might seem outrageous. The very thought of aiding people to end their existence is beyond the comprehension of many. I would argue that such people may not have seen those they love in excruciating and debilitating pain, an experience that would transform anyone into a vessel intended to carry out all wishes of those who are suffering.
As we age, those around us – parents, siblings, spouses and friends alike – get older, sicker and eventually die. That is the most devastating truth about aging and a fact that is ignored until it is impossible to do so.
All who care deeply for those around them who suffer long and painful deaths should understand that the only thing some pray for is deliverance. They look for a release from an agonizing existence with a grim prognosis and an entrance into whatever they believe to be laid out before them. If nothing else, they seek an escape from what has become of their lives.
Though illegal in most states, this issue has over time slowly gained more support in California. Bills have traveled through state legislature, most recently losing by a hairline vote.
L.A. Weekly termed the bill as a “right-to-die measure for terminally ill patients,” which differs from a pro-euthanasia proposition. Technically, the term “euthanasia” would legalize the action of one person administering lethal doses of drugs to another, which is not the case of such attempted measures.
Instead, what is proposed is the legality of a terminally ill patient, in sound mind expected to die within the next six months, to request lethal doses of medication to be able to die painlessly and, in some schools of thought, with some pride intact. The difference is that the patients would administer the medication to themselves in a pill form.
This same article featured a man who had promised his wife, of many years, on her deathbed that he would do all he could to ensure she died peacefully and painlessly.
The woman had been diagnosed with cancer and after surgery and intensive chemotherapy, it was decided that she was incurable.
Once her discomfort had become unbearable, her husband asked the doctor to administer drugs to his dying wife, allowing her to die peacefully as she had requested. The doctor refused.
Shortly afterwards, the woman was medically induced into a coma. Her husband noticed a wheezing sound exuding from her lungs and questioned the doctor about the odd noise. The reply this man received about his comatose, dying wife was that he was hearing the liquid in her lungs that would eventually drown her to death – the very thing he witnessed while sleeping at her side that final night.
This is not some fabricated story to beg an emotion from any reader; it is a clarification of reality.
I, myself, have watched such a passing. I stood by my father’s side as he died of cancer. By the time it was diagnosed, the cancerous mass had metastasized so extensively that he was no longer a candidate for a liver transplant.
My father was finally sent home from the hospital after being told there was nothing else the doctors could do. Equipped with a bottle of morphine pills to “alleviate discomfort,” it would be proven that, once an illness has progressed so aggressively, there is little to comfort the body, the mental anguish being too excruciating.
After his death, I forced myself to consider the option of euthanasia. My reaction to such a proposal was that it would have spared him a great deal of pain.
Though he never put forth a request for such relief, I felt obligated to determine what I would have done in such a situation.
I am confident, both morally and ethically, without a doubt, that I would have granted him such a wish, irrespective of any legal implications that might have resulted for me. I am bound to my morals first; a foundation I believe is, at times, more ethical than written law.
It is not merely a question of a moral agreement with the notion of what is requested of you by those you love, those who are in an excruciatingly terminal state of illness. Instead, it is a necessity to honor their desires, their dying wishes.
As an adult of sound mind, I should be awarded the freedom to make decisions concerning the status of my person, free from legal consequences.
All that remains in my memory pertaining to this issue is that, at times, it is more difficult to witness others in pain than to experience it yourself as you stand by his side and promise to do all he asks, knowing, all the while that something he may request may be beyond your means. Powerless, you make empty promises all the same: to provide hope, reassurance and what is left of a gesture of love and compassion.
There is nothing more I can reveal than my hope that not many more have to endure such a painful process before some legislative progress is made on this issue. It will benefit our families, friends and who knows, possibly, in the future, ourselves.
Sarah Al-Mulla is a junior journalism major.
