Suicide By Any Other Name Still Means Death

A recent story which has made national headlines involves a young woman who has decided to take her own life on a date certain in order to avoid the pain and suffering that accompanies the dying process.  As I understand the story, she has been told by her physicians that she has only a few months to live due to a terminal illness.  Thus, her decision to take her own life.

(1)       This is suicide.

(2)       It is wrong.

My wife has taken to Facebook to suggest, very gently, that what this young woman is doing is suicide.  Several people suggested that somehow what this young woman is doing is something other than suicide.  Oddly, when Robin Williams took his life earlier this year, very few of us had any trouble identifying his act with the word suicide.  Was his pain any less meaningful than this young woman’s?  Did he not choose to end his life?  Were his goals not equally likely related to ending suffering (his at a minimum – perhaps also pain he perceived others might be having).  How is what he did suicide but what this woman is doing is something other than suicide?  Is her announced intention to kill herself somehow the defining characteristic?  Really?  

According to the Merriam Webster Dictionary suicide is “the act or an instance of taking one's own life voluntarily and intentionally especially by a person of years of discretion and of sound mind.”  Gosh, poke me in the eye and call me a potato, but that sounds suspiciously like this young woman’s circumstances.  I guess Merriam Webster needs to reconfigure its definition to suit all the naysayers.  She’s committing suicide.  As one of my law professors used to say, you can call the thing a gumdrop, it is what it is.  There is no way around it, no way of dressing it up and making it nice, no way of condescending to call this anything other than what it is: suicide. 

The other very odd thing to me is that so many, including alleged Christians, are somehow painting this young woman’s intention as noble.  Let me understand this: avoiding pain and suffering is noble?  Trying to prevent others from seeing you suffer is noble?  Life is hard and marked by many difficulties, one of which is death.  As a Christian, I believe that God acts providentially such that we all have an intended life span.  Unfortunately, the effects of sin (I mean sin generally – I’m not suggesting this young woman is terminally ill because she sinned) mean the world is an imperfect place.  Our tenure on this planet includes accepting the reality that we will die, sometimes due to illness or injury in ways that will cause pain to both us and those who love us.  This young woman taking her life doesn’t make her death any less deadly. 

Trying to control death is an illusion.  Will this family really be any more comforted that this young woman took her life than if she died after fighting as hard as she could until she finally succumbed to whatever disease it is that will eventually take her life?  It’s ironic that we talk about how honorable it is that people “fight” their disease when they don’t give up.  This young woman will be dead in either event.  However, by supposedly sparing her family the devastation of seeing her go through the ordeal of dying, she actually deprives her family of the chance to come to grips with the utter unfriendliness, the unnaturalness, and the villainy of death.  Her suicide invokes the idea that she is somehow mastering death in some fashion, that she is taming it in some way.  Really, all she is doing is telling her family she and they are insufficient to handle the difficulty of death.  She will not master it at all, any more than Robin Williams did.

I once litigated a wrongful death case in which the plaintiff’s attorney had the entire family of a young man – parents and three sisters – all testify about their loss.  The judge, during a break, suggested to me he thought they were overdoing it.  He commented “dead is dead.”  His point was that everyone on the jury understood, after hearing from just one family member, that the family really missed him and was deeply hurt by his untimely death (he was 20 years old).  The trial was several years after the young man died: his family was still hurting. 

This young woman will fail to achieve her goal.  After she kills herself, her family will still grieve.  Sure, she will prevent herself from going through some amount of suffering and her family won’t have to watch her go through it.  But isn’t that part of dealing with the hardships of life?  Do we so lightly value life that we determine if it gets too hard we should simply end it?  That’s really all that’s happening here. 

As a Christian, I must conclude what she is doing is wrong.  We should allow God to work through our circumstances until He decides He’s finished with us.  He is the only true master of death.