Last week, we shared a story about a woman who became the first person in Manitoba to have a medically assisted death in a church.
Here are some responses we received:
Note: Emails are edited and condensed for clarity and length.
From Jack Paleczny:
As a hospital chaplain and United Church minister, I have had many bedside experiences. Now I am a caregiver for my very ill wife whose dementia makes her not a candidate for MAID.
I do not believe in an afterlife and I have no fear of death.
The virtues of Christian life are relevant not because of a promise of reward but for the very goodness and meaning they bring to life.
When I have a sense that my life is completed and if I face endless meaningless suffering, whether physical or mental, I shall happily choose MAID, with no fear or regret.
What lives on after [people pass away] is the people they loved, the community they helped create and the natural world they preserved.
From Mary Jane Apcar:
My brush with the realization of death occurred recently [when] a long-time friend that I met many years ago in church passed away.
In the span of a month, she was suffering from breathing problems and was taken to hospital. Her family kept a faithful vigil. I visited three times and was unable to get a response [from her], all the while holding her hand, telling her that we all loved her and her church family sends their love.
It was like a cloud or curtain was present between us, and neither one of us could reach the other. I was not afraid of death, but I miss my friend dearly. I realize the blessing was to have known and loved her for as long as we knew each other.
From Margaret Thompson:
My mother Helen died at 103 on Nov. 16, 2020. In the aftermath of her death, I would flinch inwardly at the well-intentioned phrase, “Well, at least she lived a long life.” Foremost for me, however, was that she needn’t have died how and where she did — of Covid, in a retirement home ill-equipped to handle such an outbreak.
For months before her death, I had to time my visits carefully to avoid finding Mom napping. She had grown weary. “I’ve lived long enough,” she’d say, or “I wouldn’t be upset if I knew I wasn’t going to wake up tomorrow.” All such pronouncements were made in a matter-of-fact way. She had reassured me a number of times that she did not fear death because it would allow her to be in the presence of God.
Two days before she died, she was connected to me by phone and the last words I ever heard from her were, “That’s my daughter’s voice.”
The final phone call came two days later. I was told that there was a caregiver with Mom, holding her hand as she died. How I longed to have been that person.
Mom’s ashes rest in an urn at my brother’s home. Covid will dictate when we can hold a service and scatter her ashes in the memory garden at St. George’s Anglican Church in Clarksburg, Ont. In the meantime I float in a void punctuated by grief, trying to imagine a time when Mom will be reunited with Dad, whose ashes rest amongst the church garden’s rose bushes. We will honour Mom well and I will pray, yet again, for her forgiveness.
|
