“My wish for you is that you continue.

Continue to be who and how you are.

To astonish a mean world with your acts of kindness.

Continue to allow humor to lighten the burden of your tender heart.”

-Maya Angelou

Okay, so what’s the real issue with physician-assisted death? It’s more than terminology, that much I can tell you.

The real issue is that promoting a patient’s right to choose when he/she dies completely destroys that person’s sense of true worth. People are more than their choices. Human beings are special precisely because we can freely and reasonably choose to pursue what’s good for one another and mankind as a whole.

What other creature thinks abstractly about its own nature? Teaching primates sign language is pretty cool, but can it question its own existence? Science and philosophers both tell us no. Still, one doesn’t have to be a philosopher to see that humans are more unique than anything else in the world, just the way we are.

People learn, speak, sing, paint, run, create, and spend time with one another for the heck of it. We do it because we can appreciate our very existence. We can share emotion that draws us outside of ourselves and our struggles.

Bringing humanity’s worth down to his power to choose is not inherently a bad thing. But when we use our power of choice to destroy ourselves or the lives surrounding us, we’ve done something terribly wrong.

Man’s strength lies in resilience and comradery through trials of life. We can be tempted to despair and give up. But it is precisely in supporting one another to overcome that temptation that makes man great.

Besides, centuries of humankind’s history isn’t much in the grand scheme of things — making our individuality all the more precious.

Let’s fight for the good of one another. Let’s celebrate the time we have on earth down to the very last drop of life within us by sharing in one another’s trials.By bearing life’s burdens in the comradery we always have. By choosing to be there for one another instead of writing each other off with a fatal farewell.

Because charity makes us human.