Euthanasia would rob people of meaningful end of life

By Deborah Gyapong

Canadian Catholic News

OTTAWA (CCN) — Palliative care experts told a conference here March 25 - 26 that legalizing euthanasia could rob many people of some of the richest, most meaningful moments of their lives.

“We are not fighting merely to keep euthanasia a crime, but because it takes away the few days that are of extraordinary importance in a person’s life,” Dr. Patrick Vinay, head of palliative care at Montreal’s Hôpital Notre-Dame, told the seminar organized by the Catholic Organization for Life and Family (COLF).

Several speakers spoke of the role helplessness, powerlessness and spiritual poverty play in bringing about true human evolution. This state could be avoided by those who decide to avail themselves of euthanasia or assisted suicide to protect their autonomy.

Disability activist Mark Pickup, who has lived with multiple sclerosis for 25 years, said he had to stop resisting what he could not control.

Though he has experienced physical pain and loss of mobility, Pickup said emotional, moral and spiritual forms of suffering are more difficult to reach and harder to treat. “Spiritual pain is the most excruciating,” he said. Though tempted to become bitter, Pickup described spiritual poverty as a “forerunner of spiritual transformation.”

In his dark night of the soul, Christ came alongside him. “Here I was invited into his redemptive act,” he said. “Christ was calling me, uniting my suffering with his on the cross.”

In his weakness and rational fears, he found he could rest in Jesus’ “tender embrace” as a child of God. Joy follows the sorrow affliction, he said, and often tears of joy and sorrow flow together.

“It is only in real surrender we can find real liberty,” he said. “Christ’s light is taking back my darkness.”

In a televised interview from France, L’Arche founder Jean Vanier told the conference all human beings experience vulnerability and fragility, though the powerful try to shunt those who are weaker aside.

Vanier spoke of the importance of creating community where each person has a place to develop his or her gifts, where people are present for each other and find a place to love and be loved.

He urged the building of a society based on friendship and companionship and not one where everyone is “hiding behind their own little television.” He warned of the anguish of loneliness that especially afflicts the weak, but is affecting healthy young people as well, tempting them to suicide.

Dr. John Scott, an Ottawa palliative care physician, described end-of-life care that is “worthy of the human person.” He said listening and asking the right questions can help dying patients discover the meaning of their human story. “The Holy Spirit has been at work in that person’s life already,” he said. “The conversation goes off in amazing ways.”

He said both patient and doctor have a sense of the mystery of God that even non-religious people experience.

He urged that palliative care not be hijacked by the so-called “right to die” movement. “We are hearing our society lament,” he said. He said the “euthanasia talk” and “death talk” is not only a sign that “our society is sick, probably unto death,” but also “it is a desperate cry to God.”

Vinay outlined the process a person goes through after the first “earthquake” of receiving a diagnosis of a fatal illness such as lung cancer.
A sick person first enters into a “bubble of power” as he seeks to be in control of his illness, Vinay said. His family, his doctors and his hospital share that same bubble, encouraging him to fight that spot of cancer, isolating the disease. In this phase, the patient’s personal life is “absent” as he is pushed from exam to exam, chemo to chemo, and treated almost like a guinea pig.

But as the disease progresses, the patient experiences a second earthquake, where defeat sets in, and the doctor’s “toolbox is empty,” Vinay said. There are no more treatments available and the sick person’s death looms like an elephant in the room.

The patient leaves the bubble of strength and enters a bubble of powerlessness, he said. “The person has to live out this helplessness a prisoner of his failing body.”

Yet something mysterious and dynamic begins to happen in the pain and disorientation and the loss of autonomy the dying person experiences, he said. The sick person needs to ask for help. But the family also enters this bubble, as do the doctors. This makes them extremely uncomfortable, he said.

“I see my own incapacity to help the person,” he said. “We are in a situation of defeat, where professional answers are insufficient. I feel completely incompetent.”

“The patient falls into a chasm, yet still opens his hand to the specialist, who takes off the white coat of an expert and the patient encounters another human being,” he said. “They are now both equals, facing the mystery of life.”

“It is so easy to run away from this space,” Vinay said, urging instead a desire and a decision to be present, to experience the relationship of one being with another, as if they could trade places, because they are both facing suffering and powerlessness.

Then something precious happens, he said. “I feel within my own heart that I am reaching that sick person.”

A sense of resonance that develops between the mutual recognition of the “I” and the “sense of presence” is a universal, non-religious phenomenon, he said.

The resonance has an immediate impact on the patient that transforms the bubble of helplessness into a bubble of meaning, he said.

The priority for the patient ceases to be the illness, but relationships with others, to say something important, to forgive, he said. It energizes the family, brings about a new sense of community and personal growth, making everyone more spiritually alive.

Things are said in these moments that have a huge and lasting impact on family and friends, he said. Families gain a new perspective on their loved one, who may become a “hero in a bed.”

There is a new face of the sick person under the suffering, he said. Contacts with family and others gain a whole new importance, a density of meaning.

Vinay said people working in palliative care must create an environment of acceptance so people can evolve at end of life.

“There is no place more spiritual than a hospital, he said.