On assisted suicide
KATELYN BEATTY: “And if we are lucky, our life will end in the way that it began: in an intimate circle of care, with the people whom we are bound to in this lifetime speaking words of boundless love over us.”
katelynbeaty.substack.com/p/lets-ag…
DAVID FRENCH
“Perhaps this mind-set is the inevitable byproduct of workism — the idea that we are defined more by our jobs and careers than by our faith, our families or our friendships — which has our culture by the throat. Parents, for example, find it far more important that their children be financially independent and have productive careers than that they marry or have children.
But if your value is determined by your productive work, then it’s easy to see how people perceive that they lose their value when they are no longer productive or when their vulnerability limits their success.
Our commitment to individual liberty can also create the illusion of individual autonomy, a sense that I am the captain of my own fate. Taken together, workism and individual autonomy tell us that we are defined by our status and that our status is largely within our control.
Yet our value is defined by our humanity, not our productivity, and when we live in close community, vulnerability and suffering pull us together. It can trigger a feeling of love and care so powerful and painful that it changes us forever. It softens us. It humbles us. It awakens awareness of the needs of other people.”
The lesson is clear. Isolation brings death; community brings life. And we build community in part by recognizing that we are not in control and that each of us will one day desperately need someone else to love us, care for us and cherish us.
This is not because we’re successful or capable or living a life that others deem to be worth living, but because we’re human beings of incalculable worth — no matter our vulnerability or our pain.