Re “29 and Beautiful. Oh, No!”
[img]2800|right|Brittnay Maynard||no_popup[/img]The most dismaying turn of the willfully tragic Brittany Maynard tale is her mother’s depressingly passive public observation just before her daughter’s scripted death on Saturday.
Brittany, ailing with inoperable cancer, was Debbie Ziegler’s only child. Brittany shot to national attention and became People magazine’s latest cover girl when she declared when and how she would abruptly quit her life.
Sounding like a random passenger on a Greyhound passing through town, Ms. Ziegler said blankly last week:
“It’s not my job to tell her how to live.
“It’s not my job to tell her how to die.
“It’s my job to love her through it all.”
How cold.
If my mother, heaven forbid, acted that disinterested while standing by my death bed, I would have her escorted from the room.
I would be destroyed if my daughter did that.
Three days after 29-year-old Ms. Maynard made a video indicating she had changed her mind about committing suicide to escape pain, she committed suicide to escape pain.
Bright, unusually beautiful and two years married, she became celebrated, a hero to an odd crowd of train-wreck fans, when she announced “Enough with the suffering. I am going to leave the world on my terms.”
Fight it, as we are doing in our family.
Who knows what can happen? You don’t. I don’t. Doctors are guessing.
Does your curiosity have a terminal illness, too?
