Brooks Barnes wrote this story in today’s New York Times about a documentary at the Sundance Film Festival called “How to Die in Oregon.” The documentary apparently explores physician-assisted suicide in the state of Oregon, where it is legal.

Barnes reports that one woman’s story is a through-line of the documentary. She is Cody Curtis, and decides to end her life with the help of her doctor and in the presence of her husband. Who can read this account and not feel some small degree of the immense pain that this family must have endured together? Barnes’ reportage centers around whether we, the viewers, are able to face death. Many reporters and a good share of the HBO production staff themselves could not bear to watch it. But I wonder, also, whether part of the almost unbearable face-to-faceness of this cinematic experience has to do with a question of whether we ought to be showing a family’s path through assisted suicide in a commercial film. I don’t know, but I think the reluctance of so many to sit through the whole film is more complicated than just not wanting to confront death. After all, how many of those who cannot watch the film would turn away from a dying loved one in person?

And in the midst of this lies almost buried a breakthrough quotation from Ms. Curtis’ husband, Stan Curtis, in response to why his wife let her saga, including her decline and death, be filmed: “My wife understood the meaning of her own life.”

He continues, “It seems like a story about dying, but actually it is very much a story about living.”

In this wise confession, I heard an echo of what theology can and should be about: stewarding stories of living, so that people can have for themselves the consolation of the meaning of their own life. And if not that consolation, at least the consolation of the hope for that having. Once theology takes this wide angle of vision, the side of more life, and as I would like to put it, life in its singular and strange beauty, its task includes accounting all those facets of that beauty, however apparently “non-theological.” Music is part of that, of course, and in Ms. Curtis’ story it is her family, and within the family, the symbolic handing-over of precious material from her life to her children: jewelry and recipes. Theology worthy of our lives and work, and of the theological tradition, is indeed finally “very much a story about living.”

Tom Beaudoin

Hastings-on-Hudson, New York

2 Comments »

1. 

   I live in Cape Town and this morning I watched the program on the Right to Die in Oregon. It brought back a flood of memories for me.
   I lost a husband at 53 years of age to Prostate Cancer nearly 17 years ago. I was only 47 with 2 sons. Aged 12 and just turned 15.
   The worst possible age for any child to lose a parent.

   Three weeks before my husband died he looked me straight in the eye and said : *If you did not need the Insurance Policy for all the Medical Bills and all the costs that are going to come your way I would blow myself away. But they won’t allow me to do that. If I do, they will refuse to pay out the Insurance*.

   How can we bring human beings down to that level and make them suffer?

   Its horrendous. My husband’s death still haunts my 2 sons and I today.

   Yes life goes on but its a traumatic event, especially for young children to have to witness. No human being should have to go through such suffering. We are kinder to our dogs. We put them out of their misery and pain but we don’t do this for those we love because religion says its wrong. How much misery does a loving God want from us? Is there not enough in all the man-made misery we create with wars and greed?

   I support the *Right to Die with Dignity* with all my heart.

   Comment by Jenny — August 15, 2012 @ 3:34 am

2. 

   I can relate to all this with some life long pain I have had glad u were. There to hold her hand and guide the way I bet she was lost

   Comment by Jet — February 4, 2013 @ 5:43 pm

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