Back in 1991 or so, I was invited by an elderly and ill suicidal friend — along with about 20 of her other pals — to gather in her apartment for a suicide party. Frances’ idea was that she would tell us how much we meant to her, we would reciprocate, and she would swallow pills.
Instead, all her friends were appalled and held an intervention. Soon, the suicide was off. (Frances did the deed the next year, after telling her friends she wouldn’t, under the influence of proselytizing literature published by the assisted suicide Hemlock Society, a sad tale recounted in my book Forced Exit.)
Back then, celebrating or otherwise honoring a suicide was unthinkable. Today, thanks to the assisted suicide movement, suicide parties and ceremonies are becoming common (and increasingly reported in the media). From a syndicated story that ran in the Rome (Georgia) News Tribune:
In early August, Christina Werner, a retired operating room nurse, met up with a close friend for a walk through the redwoods in Marin County. It’s a common pastime for many people in the Bay Area, but this walk was different, Reasons to Be Cheerful reports .
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Werner and her friend went on the hike specifically to celebrate the life of a friend, an outdoor enthusiast and nursing colleague who had suffered immensely with ALS — the rare, fatal neurological disorder that causes the gradual loss of motor neurons in the brain and spinal cord — and was physically unable to leave the house anymore.
Their friend had chosen to end her struggles that morning in an end-of-life ceremony held at the friend’s home, among a small group of loved ones and an end-of-life doula named Anthea Grimason.
On the hike, both women shed tears, but there was not a big sense of doom. Werner was excited that everything had gone according to her friend’s death plan, and that her suffering had ended.
“We were sad, and she will be sorely missed, but we all leave this earth, and I am happy for her in a weird way,” Werner says. “She was suffering, but she made it really comfortable for everybody. She was excited for her D-Day. It put her in control of a body that wasn’t functioning for her anymore.”
The larger story in the cited report is about so-called death cafes where people go to discuss death and dying. I certainly believe we should all remember that we are going to die as a means of focusing our faith or concentrating on how to live better lives.
But by attending a suicide party or ceremony, we validate the decision and, in so doing, become complicit in that death. This matters because even the most ill suicidal persons can, with proper prevention interventions, change their minds. By supporting the suicide choice, we may be robbing our loved one of a last chance at further life that he or she might have found satisfying and worth living.
So, if you are ever asked to attend such a gathering, I hope you will love the person enough to make what may seem the harder choice: Refuse and instead offer support in their continuing to live.
Some may accuse you of judgmentalism. So be it.
Or they may accuse you of abandoning the suicidal person. But really, it is the other way around.
LifeNews.com Note: Wesley J. Smith, J.D. is Chair and Senior Fellow at the Discovery Institute’s Center on Human Exceptionalism. Wesley is a contributor to National Review and is the author of 14 books, in recent years focusing on human dignity, liberty, and equality. Wesley has been recognized as one of America’s premier public intellectuals on bioethics by National Journal and has been honored by the Human Life Foundation as a “Great Defender of Life” for his work against suicide and euthanasia. Wesley’s most recent book is Culture of Death: The Age of “Do Harm” Medicine, a warning about the dangers to patients of the modern bioethics movement. He blogs at Human Exeptionalism.
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