At its best Roman Catholic piety can be enormously powerful. It offers what we may call a way of affirmationa sacramental understanding of the countless ways in which we meet the holy God in the everyday life of bodily gestures, repetitive prayer, candles, motherhood. And it does this without losing an equally powerful way of negation, which forbids us to suppose we can capture or control the presence of the transcendent God in such ways. But precisely because this intricate system of spiritual practice is so powerful, it can also go bad in powerful ways. Affirmation is safe only when negation is also present. One can become fascinated not so much with God as with ones own experience of candles, beads, genuflection, and a virgin mother. And then one may lose the transcendent otherness of that God in a way that would hardly be possible for, say, a serious Calvinism (which would, of course, have its own way of going bad).

This was, I have to confess, my first thought after reading At His Own Wake, Celebrating Life and the Gift of Death, a recent New York Times article about the death by euthanasia in Canada of a man named John Shields. Clearly intended to elicit pathos in its readers, the account is, by my lights, drowning in bathos. Let me admit straightforwardly at the outset: I dont much like the John Shields portrayed in this article, though he was much loved by some who knew him. I like even less some of the other characters who play significant roles in Mr. Shieldss deathas, for example, Penny Allport, the life-cycle celebrant whose task it was to orchestrate and choreograph the homemade rituals, drawn from countless different (and incompatible) cultural and religious traditions, that shaped Mr. Shieldss last hours and his death. I am not at all fond of Dr. Stefanie Green who, needing a better life-work balance than her practice of maternity and newborn care permitted, turned to a focus on implementing Canadas year-old legalized medical assistance in dying. Birth and death, deliveries in and outI find it very transferable, she says. Both are really intense and really important. (Is it just an accident that the title of the Times article celebrates lifenot the gift of lifewhile celebrating the gift of death? Perhaps the two are not so transferable after all.)

These are minor dislikes, however, compared with my reaction to the shameful inability of the Times and its journalist/reporter/essayist, Catherine Porter, to help readers not just to sympathize (as we should) with Mr. Shields in his suffering but also to think critically, distinguishing bathos from pathos. Evidently Ms. Porter was present as a silent participant throughout the events recounted in her article, an article the Times deemed important enough to run on its front page. Indeed, it is hard to detect any critical distance at all in her authorial voice. In the context of our societys deep divisions and confusions about the practice of euthanasia, this article amounts to a puff piece aimed at evoking support for one side of a complicated moral argument. A shorter piece on the op-ed page would have been more honest.

John Shields was evidently a man with great energy and a capacity to take interest in many aspects of life, though also in his own perceived uniqueness. Ordained a priest in the Roman Catholic Church, he left after four years, though not before being prohibited from preaching and teaching at his parish in Austin, Texas. After that he became a social worker and, later, president of the British Columbia Government Employees Union, over which he presided for fourteen years. After his first wife died of lymphoma he eventually married for a second time. He studied some Gestalt therapy, learned dowsing, and came to regard himself as a spiritual cosmologist, believing that the universe was conscious and that everything was inextricably connected. Having left institutional religion for a kind of generalized spirituality strikes me as rather less countercultural than Mr. Shieldss self-image would suggestand certainly far from unique. I come forth at this precise moment to contribute my unique gifts to the great unfolding, he wrote in a memoir. And while this does not exactly bring Hegel to mind, we get the idea and can see why Ms. Allport would call his death his great blooming.

His character was marked by the twists and turns of the several directions his life had taken. He loved rituals, which began with the Catholic Masses of his childhood. To be of service was a central theme in his life, as was the theme of freedom. He was always growing and exploring. Sadly, though, in his mid-seventies he was diagnosed with amyloidosis, a disease in which abnormal proteins accumulate in the bodys organs, eventually causing death. Mr. Shields gradually lost feeling in and use of his arms and legs, finally having to enter hospice care. In his debilities he felt a loss of dignity, a diminished condition that he found demeaning and unacceptable.

As it happened, the man and the moment were well matched. For only a year before Canada had legalized what it calls medical assistance in dying. This permits not just assisted suicide but also euthanasia, in which a physician actually administers the death-dealing drugs. The law does prohibit euthanasia that is nonvoluntarythat is, when the dying person is, for whatever reason, no longer able to consent at the time the drugs are actually administered. This was in fact a worry for Shields and his wife: as his condition swiftly declined, they feared that if he waited too long, he might be unable to give his consent when the chosen day arrived. And, in fact, it is hard to believe that this restriction can long surviveat least in British Columbia where, according to the Times article, an increasing number of patients are eagerly embracing euthanasia. Dr. Green herself, while adhering to the laws limits, suggests that there should be more flexibility in the law, a flexibility that would permit euthanasia for those who requested it before reaching a condition in which they are unable to consent.

The Canadian law also specifies that, in order to qualify for euthanasia, an adult must be in an irremediable medical condition, experiencing suffering he or she finds intolerable, and likely to die fairly soon in any case. It is just as hard to believe that these conditions can hold for too long. Patients with severe but not life-threatening disabilities may well find their condition demeaning and undignified. Why exactly the fact that they are not likely to die soon should matter more than the felt indignity of their condition is far from clear.

In short, the Canadian law tries to ground permission for euthanasia in both compassion for those who suffer and a freedom to make important choices about the course and duration of ones life. But, as Daniel Callahan noted years ago, these criteria are on a collision course. If freedom and self-determination are this importantso important that we have a right to help in ending our lifehow can we insist that such help may be offered only to those who are suffering irremediably? On the other hand, if the suffering of others makes so powerful a claim upon us that we should be willing to cause their death in order to end the suffering, it is not clear why we should limit our merciful help only to those who are still able to request it. After all, fully autonomous people are not the only ones who can suffer greatly. We may safely predict that the limits will gradually be extended.

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Pathos, Bathos, and Euthanasia - Commonweal