Citizen Columns
Question
The Pope recently asked scientists to help him determine the exact point of death. How would your faith group answer this question? Do you think science can answer it?
Answer
Science’s answer has changed repeatedly over the last hundred years, and scientists will continue to refine their answer as they gather more evidence about the process of physical death (one can also speak about spiritual death but that’s not the subject of your question). Medical technology now makes it possible to prolong life in ways unimaginable to our grandparents. And yet this same technology can also have the paradoxical effect of prolonging death. This is the question posed every day in hospital rooms as families ponder whether or not to increase pain
medication or remove life-support equipment from their dying loved one.
I recall a woman dying of cancer in a hospice. Doctors estimated she could live for another few days, maybe a week. She was on morphine but still in terrible, writhing pain. The ethical dilemma was that an increase in the dosage of morphine would eliminate the pain and make her comfortable, but it would also slow down her body and hasten death. The family opted to keep her pain free. Her last day was quiet as she slept a drug-induced sleep and departed this life peacefully, surrounded by prayers, friends and family members. In my opinion she had a good death, of the kind we Orthodox pray for at every Divine Liturgy, “A Christian ending to our life: painless, blameless, and peaceful.” But was that euthanasia? I fear this is what lies behind the Pope’s question.
A precise answer about the exact point of death leaves no doubt as to when the morphine can be stopped and the machines turned off. But even when such precision is available, I’m not sure it is always pastorally useful. I would prefer that we live with the uncertainty medical advances have given us and make decisions as best we can, taking into consideration all the facts at our disposal with a given person at a given time, prolonging life when possible and allowing death to proceed when necessary.
|
