The saddest, most perplexing story in the morning newspapers was the latest bulletin from the horrendously disappointing Brittany Maynard.
Gorgeous.
Twenty-nine years old.
Cover girl for People magazine.
Still a bride after two years.
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Brittany Maynard and hubby Dan Diaz.
Unlike 331 million other Americans, Ms. Maynard has widely announced that she will die two weeks from Saturday.
No record of whether she has checked in with God. Up to Ms. Maynard, he has handled most deaths on the planet since Eden was a garden.
Suffering, literally, from brain cancer, diagnosed on New Year’s Day, she underwent surgery but the cancer returned in April when she was given six months to live.
If Ms. Maynard will forgive my arrogance, so what? Six months is a bloody guess. My brother-in-law was give two weeks. He lived three years and two months, most of it pretty actively.
When Diane was diagnosed with ALS six months and eight days ago this afternoon, at 4 o’clock, I told her then, and numerous times since, I wish we could exchange places.
Why surrender? Why give in? Do you go home when a traffic signal turns red? No. You stay because it is going to change. Why can’t that happen with brain cancer? Strength, baby, strength.
When I was born, God said you can have brains or looks or Ari Noonan’s body. I had a choice? You see how that turned out.
Not long ago, Ms. Maynard uprooted her husband, her Southern California parents, and they all moved to Oregon where, by a daffy law, she can legally kill herself.
Right. And my true name is Julius Caesar. Hand me the butter knife, Brutus.
The quaveringly insane Death with Dignity crowd thinks Ms. Maynard is heroic. Death with (ugh) Dignity, in the sense of these insecure, pathetic losers, is oxymoronic.
My religious beliefs would prevent me from stepping in her ghoulish footprints.
Well?
Lovely, educated, newly married.
What more motivation do you need to fight to live, to make a difference, to influence people, to drink in the mundane interlaced with the magnificent?
“I don’t want to die,” says the U.C. Irvine graduate. “There is not a single suicidal cell in my body.”
She speaks further nonsense. She chose Nov. 1 because she wanted to see her husband’s late October birthday. She loves him so darned much she will sing “Happy Birthday, tra-la-la, and out the window I go. Bye, darling.”
So this is Ms. Maynard’s reported schedule for Closing Day.
Still growing accustomed to her new home in Death with Dignity Oregon, she will retire to her upstairs bedroom in the afternoon and turn on soft music. Surrounded by a knot of people closest to her in life, “she will drink a cup of water infused with a physician-prescribed drug,” go to sleep and never wake up.
