My grandmother was not an easy woman to watch decline.

She had been sharp her whole life. Quick with a Scripture, quicker with an opinion, and completely uninterested in being handled carefully just because she was old. She lived alone longer than anyone thought she should and she did it on purpose. Independence was not just a preference for her. It was dignity.

When her health started going she fought every accommodation. Every handrail. Every pill organizer. Every suggestion that maybe she should not be driving anymore. She did not want help because help felt like the beginning of the end.

And eventually the end came anyway. The way it comes for everyone regardless of how hard they fought it.

I watched her in those final weeks and I thought about what it means to suffer. What it means to lose the body while the mind is still running. What it means to be someone who built a full life and find yourself depending on other people for the most basic things.

I understood in that season why some people look at that picture and say there should be another option. A cleaner exit. A more merciful ending. I understood it because I felt the weight of watching someone I loved move through something hard and I wanted it to stop.

But I kept coming back to the same question. Merciful by whose definition.

Because what I also watched in those weeks was something the assisted suicide conversation never includes. I watched my grandmother receive love in a way she had never received it before. I watched family members who had drifted come back. I watched her say things she had held for years. I watched her make peace with people and with God in a way that required the time she almost did not have.

The suffering was real. The grace inside it was also real. And if someone had handed her a way out three weeks earlier she would have missed both.

Euthanasia and assisted suicide are being sold to this generation as the compassionate choice. The dignified option. The one that puts the individual in control of the most personal decision a human being faces. And I understand the appeal of that framing. I do.

But I am not sure we get to call something compassion when it permanently closes every door that might have opened in the time we are cutting short. I am not sure a society that cannot sit with suffering is actually more advanced than one that learns to walk through it together. And I am not sure the God who numbers our days handed that authority to a doctor with a prescription pad and a consent form.

Life is His. The length of it is His. The grace hidden inside the hard parts of it is also His.

We do not always get to see what we would have missed.

 

 

Stephon Rudd

 

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