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September/October 2001 Featured Stories
Compassion in Dying

Barbara Coombs Lee interviewed by Miriam Knight

How many of you have had the experience of watching a loved one, friend or acquaintance suffer through a terminal illness? It is heart wrenching if you have the feeling in retrospect that the few days or weeks of pain-filled existence on this plane they may have gained through heroic medical effort were not worth the suffering and loss of peace and dignity.

This was the feeling of a group of 11 hospice workers in Seattle in 1993. Their response was to set up an organization called Compassion in Dying (“CID”) which gives reliable information to those who wish to hasten their death when suffering becomes intolerable. They became involved in the Assisted Dying campaign and lobbied Washington to legalize it.

Barbara Coombs Lee joined their campaign. She was a nurse and political activist who became the chief petitioner in promoting the Oregon Assisted Dying Law. It is a credit to her persistence and political acumen that Oregon is today the only state in the union that has such a law. The bill was introduced by Senator Frank Roberts, a statesman married to Governor Barbara Roberts. He introduced the legislation several times - the last time from a wheelchair. He had prostate cancer, but the law didn’t pass in time for him. He died in 1993 and the initiative passed in 1994. It was held up for three years by challenges in the courts, led by the National Right to Life Organization, but the suit was finally thrown out because they were not able to “show harm.”

Today Compassion in Dying is a national organization with local affiliates in Alaska, Washington, Oregon, Northern California, Southern California and New York. (Barbara points out that Oregon and California are bellwether states, leading social change in the country.) CID’s goal is to empower people in making choices. They support people on their own path, whatever it might be. Some may believe that they need to suffer as part of their redemption, but more commonly, they have a value and belief system where they want control over the process to die on their own terms. People courageous enough to ask a doctor how they will die may prefer to be conscious and maintain relationships with loved ones to the end. They may opt for a week or two shorter lives in order for them and their families to hold final memories of peace and comfort.

Today some 80% of deaths occur in the sterile, soulless environment of acute care hospitals. The medical professionals have taken on a priest-like role, wearing special garb and drawing curtains around their rituals. We have given up what should be a spiritual, soulful experience.

Neale Donald Walsch, the best selling author of Conversations with God, feels so strongly about the importance of this view that he is coming to Portland to give a lecture on “Dying with God” as a fundraising event for the work of the organization. The talk heralds a new awareness that assisted dying can have spiritual meaning. During two campaigns in Oregon, opponents tried to portray advocates of assisted dying as unchurched, having no significant relationship with the divine and spiritually ungrounded.

Nothing could be further from the truth. These people have rich and deep spiritual lives, though they may not adhere to a particular church. Their position is that one’s spiritual life is so personal that it should be their choice and informed by their beliefs. The Unitarians, who are the only entire church to support choice in assisted dying, support this position.

The fundamentalist opposition harks back to the concept of suffering as redemptive and that people taking their own lives are morally defective. These ideas were strongly supported by medieval kings and prelates who considered the suicides as property, and the act as a form of theft, confiscating any assets they left behind.

Legalization of assisted dying may be so abhorrent to medical and religious authoritarians because it usurps their power. They know that it goes on all the time, but tolerate it as long as it is covert. It is the legalization that is so threatening because when people have choice, they have power, and no one like to lose power.

One’s spiritual life is the sum of one’s experiences. When a person faces these issues he or she has usually traveled a long road, rich with a mix of diverse doctrines and spiritual thought. They want to carry this over into their manner of death, and desire a death that doesn’t violate every aspect of belief that they have cultivated throughout their lives – what they have come to stand for.

 All CID is advocating is that we all be permitted to choose a death that our own experience tells us is right for us.

Barbara Coombs Lee is the President of the Compassion in Dying Federation. Contact them at: Tel: 503-221-9556,
email: info@compassionindying.org,
web: www.compassionindying.org

Dying With God - From Fear To Empowerment , a lecture by Neale Donald Walsch - Thursday, September 20, Reed College Kaul Auditorium. Lecture $35, Private Reception and Lecture $100. For tickets call 503-221-9556. Proceeds will benefit Compassion In Dying, Portland Or. This event will sell out so call early.