Our lives are made up of a series of choices.
What should I have for dinner? Who should I ask to GRUB? Should I go to class today?
We ask ourselves questions like this on a regular basis because we get to decide how we want our lives to go.
But sadly, this reality is not the same for our deaths.
In a perfect life, we’re born, go to school, go to college, graduate, get a job, get married, have kids, retire, then our kids send us to Florida and we die at an old age.
But this perfect scenario doesn’t happen to all of us, as was evidenced with the case of 29-year-old Brittany Maynard.
A few months after getting married, as she enjoyed a New Year’s vacation with her husband, Maynard was diagnosed with brain cancer.
After attempting to fight the disease and finding out in April that her cancer was too strong, Maynard researched her options until she came to the conclusion that the best thing for her was to die with dignity.
Maynard and her husband relocated to Oregon, one of the five states in the U.S. where physician-assisted suicide is legal, and qualified under the state’s Death with Dignity Act to end her life legally.
The states of Washington, Montana, Vermont and New Mexico also have legalized death with dignity laws.
Maynard, who ended her life Saturday, spent the remainder of her life traveling, living as much as she could before her illness completely took over and advocating for Americans’ rights to decide when enough is enough.
Maynard released a video on YouTube that currently has more than 11 million views and wrote opinion pieces for media outlets like CNN, speaking up about the issue and making sure no one who watched her testimonies would ever doubt her state of mind.
We like to think about suicide and dying with dignity as similar concepts, but they’re not.
Suicide is not preventable by law.
When individuals make the decision to end their own life, whatever the circumstance, it’s almost impossible to stop it. Someone can choose to end their life and do it, simply by going to Wal-Mart and buying a gun or by sitting in their garage with the car engine running.
But that’s not what Maynard did.
To qualify for the Death with Dignity Act in Oregon, a person has to be 18 years of age or older, a resident of the state of Oregon, able to make and communicate health care decisions for themselves and be diagnosed with a terminal illness that will lead to death within six months.
Once a licensed physician determines these criteria have been met, the person must undergo an arduous process to get the prescribed medication that, when taken, can be used to end their life.
Suicide means giving up; dying with dignity means taking control of the inevitable.
In 1997, the Supreme Court decided in their unanimous ruling of Vacco v. Quill that bans on physician-assisted suicide were constitutional, and states have the authority to regulate and prevent doctors from assisting patients in their deaths, even those terminally ill and/or in great pain.
While I agree that regulating physician-assisted suicide is essential to prevent individuals in the wrong state of mind from taking advantage of this choice, the lack of accessibility to this option is wrong.
Dying is unavoidable. Some of us will get to live our final days in Boca Raton with other elderly people, and others will leave us prematurely because of illness or circumstance.
Life is made up of choices, but circumstance deviates our course into a shorter life filled with pain. Shouldn’t we get to decide to die with dignity early, rather than wounded and unrecognizable later?
Maynard leaves behind a story that, while it may not change the laws now, has brought the issue back to the spotlight and created conversation that could bring necessary change in the future.
Jose Bastidas is a 21-year-old mass communication senior from Caracas, Venezuela. You can reach him on Twitter @jabastidas.