Sobering thoughts for a Sunday. Mr. Morcos was a happily married man of 54 who took his own life this spring. He had Huntington’s disease and having watched his father deteriorate with the progressive illness he knew, and he had told those he loved, that he wasn’t going to experience the same fate.
He and his wife Jan discussed it. Nagui was still able to do many things but he was very afraid that he would wait too long and not be able to carry out his final wish. To die with dignity, not in agony, and to do it on his own so as not to implicate anybody else when he was gone. Jan shared some of her husband’s final writings with the Toronto Star in the hope of explaining his actions. I’m reprinting some of them here because I share his views, strongly. And I have to believe that anyone who doesn’t hasn’t seen first hand what a terminal illness does to a person. Or they have such a deep faith that they believe that kind of suffering is what a God of their understanding wants for them. I have seen it first hand and I’m not the type of person who believes like that. Claiming all desires to end one’s life are issues of mental illness is misinformed and ignorant – that’s what I believe.
“For people like me, who are terminally ill or have an incurable progressive disease and are steadfast in their resolve to hasten their death, nothing that anyone could say or do would make a difference. This issue will never go away — people like me will continue to hasten our death somehow. You must let us go.”
“I am so proud of Canada for being such a progressive nation — we’ve accepted divorce, abortion and same sex marriage. It is now time for us to do the humane thing and embrace choice for the terminally ill to have medical assistance to end their life when it has become unbearable. I now pass the torch to you, my dearest family and friends, to do the right thing and change this so that you and your loved ones will have more choice than I did.”
Couldn’t agree more, Lisa.