Who has the right to die?

After suffering from an incurable lung disease for over twenty years, my mother Barbara June Cornell exercised her right to die by following a suicide recipe provided by the Hemlock Society. She ingested barbiturates prescribed by her doctor with the precise amount of alcohol described in the recipe. My mother insisted that she was exercising her right to die, knowing full well that what she was doing was illegal. In 1997, the year before her death, the Supreme Court of the United States in Washington v. Glucksberg had upheld as constitutional the State of Washington’s prohibition on assisted suicide. Three people with illnesses that left them in agony and desperate to die had joined with four doctors to challenge the constitutionality of Washington’s ban that kept doctors from legally helping the terminally ill to end their lives. They all died before their case ever reached the Supreme Court. Presumably, as my mother thought, they died with all the pain and suffering from which they had prayed for relief. Or so thought my mother. Their plight haunted her and she worried that other men and women would be deterred from taking action that was against the law. She was intent on asserting her moral right above and beyond the law; to make an example of herself so as to give courage to other ‘law abiding people’. She read the decision carefully; it morally enraged her. While the judges in the various opinions were stumbling over the meaning and definition of the right to die and what it might mean to legalise it for everyone, my mother had already succinctly defined the moral right: ‘I become my own person in the manner of my death, in the way I make it my own, my own death.’ This essay is but an elaboration on my mother’s insight into the moral basis of the right to die. And because it is that, an elaboration on her insight, I feel compelled to take back a statement I wrote in the book she asked me to write. On the day of her death my mother asked me to write a book witnessing to the dignity of her death, make it understandable to her bridge class, and to dedicate it to her. In the preface of that book I wrote that it would have to fall to others, others whose mother had not exercised the right to die, to defend the right as such. As I understood

it I had been asked for an act of devotion in my mother’s request for the book, an act of devotion that demanded that I judge that she had done the right thing for her. I had to leave aside the impulse to rationalise, in retrospect, the moral right to die. As Levinas movingly writes, ‘[r]esponsibility for the other man, being answerable for the death of the other, devotes itself to an alterity that is no longer within the province of re-presentation. This way of being devoted – or this devotion – is time. It remains a relationship to the other as other, and not a reduction of the other to the same. It is transcendence.’1