Back in the days when I worked at the coffee store in Berkeley (see Flying Blind), I met a German nurse. She confided that, some years earlier, her brother-in-law had been in the painful end-stage of terminal cancer and, at his request, she injected him with a lethal dose of morphine. I wasn’t sure why she wanted me to know this, but she certainly wasn’t the first person to seek absolution from a barista. Her confession got me thinking about a beloved uncle, who died from leukemia when he was 53. 

My uncle was one of those warm-hearted guys, with the rare ability to make everyone feel like his best friend. Extraordinarily creative, he had built a successful career as a Madison Avenue advertising executive. He was the one who encouraged me to enroll in classes at the Art Students League of New York. 

The last time I called my uncle, he was being cared for in a Manhattan hospital. He spoke very softly, pausing between each word to catch his breath. I listened patiently, because I knew he had something very important to say. “I’m … at … peace,” he began. Then he told me a story about how he found himself in the unlikely position of having to console the bereaved. 

Four or five nurses had crowded into my uncle’s room, to comfort him. One of the younger women began to cry, and pretty soon they were all in tears. This got my uncle wondering if he should be crying too. Since he lacked the strength to speak up, he signaled for one of the nurses to come close to him. He looked her in the eye and asked, “Do you think this is sadder than Dark Victory?”

Okay, it’s only funny if you are familiar with the 1939 movie Dark Victory. Bette Davis played a New York socialite, who is stricken with a malignant brain tumor. Knowing she has a few months to live and fully aware of the frightening symptoms that will afflict her, she falls in love with her doctor and marries him, goes blind, and then dies.

Thirty-nine years after my uncle died, his widow was 86-years-old and suffering from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Just like Bette Davis in Dark Victory, she knew what symptoms to expect as her health diminished, and she had a clear notion of how much time she had left. However, unlike the movie character, instead of embracing life, she got on a plane and flew from New York to Switzerland to be killed by a medical team. No doubt she had been happy for the visits of family and friends, but was she grateful? Did she think about how blessed she was to receive their love? She lived in a condominium on Manhattan’s Eastside. Did she appreciate how fortunate she was to have the financial means to hire aides, so she could have remained comfortably in her home until the end? Apparently that wasn’t good enough. If she couldn’t enjoy life on her terms, then she wanted no part of it.

Both of my novels have a subtext regarding how our experience of life is enriched through a balance of joy and sorrow. The bible gives us a larger moral lesson on the duality of the blessing and the curse, and it stresses that we have free will in determining our fate. God cautions us to be holy, and says: “Behold, I have set before you today life and good, and death and evil,” [Deuteronomy 30:15] and adds, “This day, I call upon the heaven and the earth as witnesses [that I have warned] you: I have set before you life and death, the blessing and the curse. You shall choose life…” [Deuteronomy 30:19]. I’m not a theologian, so pardon me if I misunderstood these passages or took them out of context, but the message seems to apply. 

As it happens, this week the UK Parliament is debating a bill that would legalize “Assisted Dying.” Dress it up with polite words like assisted dying, assisted suicide, or euthanasia, but it will still be the government authorizing medical professionals to kill their patients. There are well-meaning people on both sides of the issue, and the morality is open to discussion. However, the ramifications of passing such a law are not so simple.

Sir Ephraim Mirvis, the Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth, has weighed in on the proposed law. His view on its practical application, apart from any religious or moral concerns, was well expressed:

“In Belgium and the Netherlands, where assisted dying has been legal for some time, it did not take long for ‘mental anguish’ to become considered a legal and legitimate cause for assisted dying. Soon after that, it became legal to end the lives of children who are too young to fully comprehend what is happening to them. It is hard to hear that and not to conclude that the line between dying and killing is becoming blurred. I know how much has been invested in attempts to build protections into the Bill against this ‘slippery slope’. But developments in other countries show that once the law itself concedes that actively taking a person’s life is justifiable, we cross a moral Rubicon, beyond which new red lines can be easily erased and redrawn multiple times.”

Click to read the full text of Rabbi Mirvis’s statement.

Writing my current novel entailed several years of research into the life of a British Army officer. His father was also an interesting man. A wealthy Anglo-Irish landowner, he was a graduate of Oxford University and raised Thoroughbreds. As a young man in 1746, he impressed Lord Chesterfield, the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, with his warmth, wit, and genius. When he was 42-years-old, his vices caught up with him, and he became deathly ill. However, this painful curse came with an unexpected blessing. His bravado and flamboyance had made him famous throughout Europe, and a local Quaker woman learned of his languishing condition. She wrote to him, urging that he review his past life and prepare for the life to come. Her concern and warning moved him so deeply, that he had her letter read to him several times, while he was on his deathbed.

I promised my younger sister that I would pray for our uncle’s widow, and I have kept my word. It’s understandable that the woman was alarmed at the prospect of suffocating to death. Yet by her choice, she may have closed the door on something vast. The pain and suffering of the British Army officer’s father must have been intense, but perhaps those agonizing last days and moments, when his soul sought redemption and found peace, were a gift to him from God.