“Oh!”…Canada
By Patrick Hall
She was a “stuff cookie, hard lady” as a lyric from a Rolling Stones song goes. She was the mother of six by way of two marriages. She was a proud United States Army Veteran and marched in Veterans Day Parades. In the time of an emerging left-of-center, anti-United States, politically-correct culture, which gave birth to censorship on steroids, we now know as Woke culture, she gave no quarter. She loved all of her children, plus her second husband, who could be a bit of a self-centered dick at times. In the early 2000s, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. Cancer had probably been there long before the official medical verification. But she was too busy raising her kids and all that entailed. For several years, her cancer spread despite countless hours of chemo and radiation. In the end, after fighting like the hard woman she was, she succumbed to the illness. But she went down swinging choosing her own Thermopylae. Her name was Carol Elaine McCroskey Hall, my wife. In her short 49 years on this earth, she taught me and the kids a lot about life. She suffered tremendously. More than I could ever imagine even today.
Let me share a side story, that defined who Carol was. It was November 11, 2006, and she was in her final stages of terminal thoracic lumbar cancer. It was a Saturday and I took the kids up to the medical center to visit their mom for the day. The kids were getting tired that afternoon, and I thought I would take them home, and return to the cancer unit later that evening. Carol didn’t say much on my return, so I just sat by her bed, while she was halfway between awake and somewhere else. But later in the evening, maybe around 7:45 PM, she woke up and saw me, and we shared our last words as husband and wife. These were her last words to me despite her condition. She wanted to know who won the Notre Dame versus Air Force Academy football game. That Saturday, the Notre Dame game was on the College Football channel. It was not carried on the hospital’s cable subscription.
What? That was my first unsaid reaction. But I now understand that Carol even in her final days was trying to keep “it normal for as long as possible.” In retrospect, she did this for me and the kids. Carol Elaine McCroskey Hall went to God on November 13, 2006.
Once again, she was stuff cookie, a hard lady. But despite all her suffering she bucked up to the end and didn’t take the easy way out. By the way, Notre Dame won 39 to 17.
Assisted Suicide: Some Ambiguous Thoughts
It no longer fits the proverbial slippery slope analogy, that is popular when discussing the corporeality of legally assisted suicide in Canada. In many instances, those proponents of assisted suicide have dropped completely off the cliff in sanctioning government-authorized euthanasia, mercy killing, or assisted suicide. It also comes under the less truculent or aggressive phrase, Medical Assistance in Dying or MAID. Currently, assisted suicide accounts for 1 in 30 deaths in Canada. Outside of Red China and North Korea, places where these numbers are feverishly hidden. Canada’s practice of killing the terminally ill as well as the “not so ill” is frightening. Many of us have this image of assisted suicide as being the last refuge for people suffering from an incurable disease. For the most part that is true. However, it is hardly the whole story. Our neighbor to the North engages in a lot of socio-medical gymnastics to sanitize the real narrative of how their laisse fair attitude toward assisted suicide has deformed itself over the years. To cite the words of one clinical psychologist when discussing government-assisted suicide or MAID. Things often get to a terrible place one tiny step at a time. When Canada allowed mercy killings over six years ago, the practice was limited to those 18 or over with a terminal illness. However, in early 2022, the law was amended to allow assisted suicide for individuals whose natural death was not foreseeable. In addition, Canada removed the ten-day waiting period after a request for assisted suicide was made. Even this has been reduced in some urban areas to same-day petitions. Many physicians and politicians in Ottawa were on board with legislated Bill C-7 which is set to expand MAID beginning in March 2023.
Some Americans (mostly culturally liberal) have always praised or lionized Canada’s vaunted government-run health care system. Yet Americans are unaware that health care has been hyper-secularized over the last four decades. It is based on a cost-benefit analysis. If your medical Quality-Adjusted-Life-Years score (QALY) is deemed inappropriate, many within the medical care system push MAID. Also, Bill C-7 paved the way for those who are mentally ill, depressed, or just having a (bad day, month, or year) to employ the MAID option. There have been several incidents, where teenagers suffering from depression, because they broke up with their male or female friends, were permitted by so-called professional therapists to at least consider MAID. Normally, the parents of such naturally moody adolescents (a descriptive redundancy), had to sign off on these requests. But Bill C-7 also makes it possible for teens to request MAID without their parent’s permission. “Crazy-town Canadian style” has officially been embedded in the Canadian medical community.
Sidebar: In my teen years, I was still suffering from enuresis. I felt really bad about myself and subsequently never had a real girlfriend because I was a chronic bed-wetter. After all, in my way of thinking back then, it’s hard to get a date at 17 or ask a girl out, if you’re still peeing on yourself at night. Maybe I should have had the option of assisted suicide back then since I was clinically depressed. That would have solved all my problems. Right?
Some Canadian Veterans suffering from PTSD, have been encouraged by medical professionals to consider assisted suicide as an option. One Veteran, Christine Gauthier, a paralympic athlete, was advised to consider MAID after requesting a wheelchair ramp for her home. To paraphrase Ms. Gauthier, you are better off dead in Justin Trudeau’s Canada. One has to justify being alive or seeking some expensive procedure, that government-run health officials consider too expensive. For senior citizens in Canada and many other countries, some procedures are just not available once you reach a certain age, factoring in your QALY score. Heart valve and other replacement surgeries are triaged, while the MAID option is not so subtly pushed. In some provinces, you don’t even need a medical doctor to ask for MAID. A nurse, your local pharmacist, or an administrative medical professional can adjudicate a request to kill yourself. Just take recommended death therapeutics. It would save your family and most importantly the government health care system a lot of money. MAID is even pushed by private companies like Simons, which is a women’s fashion outlet. They have sponsored a very slick and heartwarming commercial highlighting MAID. It is a real-life story of an assisted suicide request, complete with a “City of Angels” background, a beach, and people standing around like the Angels in the 1998 Nicolas Cage film. There are bubbles, cellos, floating jellyfish, and the person marketing her own choice for MAID. To quote Tom Cruise in TAPs, it’s beautiful man!
But in all seriousness, it simply celebrates death. It’s Ableism, which is discrimination or social prejudice against people with disabilities or illnesses. It is the medical Rubicon, that the Canadian healthcare system has happily crossed.
As always it is the offspring of this generation of Canadians and Americans to worship themselves as “deep thinkers”. A post-World War II generation of individuals with the unending complicity or proclivity to honor themselves. The late Eric Fromm once observed, that in Western culture, we have a generation who have conveniently replaced God with themselves.
At the beginning of the section, I purposely employed the work ambiguous to call attention to my uncertainties considering assisted suicide. Of course, Carol and I during her long bout with various cancers did not consider it. It was never on our radar. Yet despite what I have said above, is tempered with a tortured ambiguity. It manifests itself as an ongoing, “very loud I don’t know” what is right or wrong in regards to MAID. What I am certain of is the growing trend to discard life whether it be assisted suicide or even abortion. In regards to the latter remember abortion was first sold to the public as something that should be rare, safe, and the last resort. Its devolution into the practice of aborting babies any time before birth should give us all pause. We as a culture, and as so-called civilized nations need to tread lightly and always question ourselves, our motivations, and our very souls.
The legalization of active euthanasia has proved to be controversial throughout the world, with only seven Western countries allowing the practice as of 2022. Belgium and the Netherlands, which have some of the most permissive euthanasia policies in the world, were the first to legalize MAID in 2002. Our neighbors to the North are currently taking it to a whole new murderous level.
From a Judaic Christian perspective, its historical catechesis has largely disapproved of suicide. Our lives belong to God! Our bodies belong to God and not ourselves! As people of the Book, we supposedly believe life is precious including the young, the old, the sick, and the depressed. We also know that we are all sinners, and this reality, this tendency can lead us to some very dark places. Quite simply, humanity apart from God is prone to see life as valuable only, if useful and successful in earthly terms. But every person, even if bedridden and unconscious, is part of God’s plan, is an actor in God’s redemption, and in some ways replicates the suffering of Christ on the cross, whom the world also disdained as useless.
She was a “stuff cookie, hard lady” as a lyric from a Rolling Stones song goes. She was the mother of six by way of two marriages. She was a proud United States Army Veteran and marched in Veterans Day Parades. In the time of an emerging left-of-center, anti-United States, politically-correct culture, which gave birth to censorship on steroids, we now know as Woke culture, she gave no quarter. She loved all of her children, plus her second husband, who could be a bit of a self-centered dick at times. In the early 2000s, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. Cancer had probably been there long before the official medical verification. But she was too busy raising her kids and all that entailed. For several years, her cancer spread despite countless hours of chemo and radiation. In the end, after fighting like the hard woman she was, she succumbed to the illness. But she went down swinging choosing her own Thermopylae. Her name was Carol Elaine McCroskey Hall, my wife. In her short 49 years on this earth, she taught me and the kids a lot about life. She suffered tremendously. More than I could ever imagine even today.
Let me share a side story, that defined who Carol was. It was November 11, 2006, and she was in her final stages of terminal thoracic lumbar cancer. It was a Saturday and I took the kids up to the medical center to visit their mom for the day. The kids were getting tired that afternoon, and I thought I would take them home, and return to the cancer unit later that evening. Carol didn’t say much on my return, so I just sat by her bed, while she was halfway between awake and somewhere else. But later in the evening, maybe around 7:45 PM, she woke up and saw me, and we shared our last words as husband and wife. These were her last words to me despite her condition. She wanted to know who won the Notre Dame versus Air Force Academy football game. That Saturday, the Notre Dame game was on the College Football channel. It was not carried on the hospital’s cable subscription.
What? That was my first unsaid reaction. But I now understand that Carol even in her final days was trying to keep “it normal for as long as possible.” In retrospect, she did this for me and the kids. Carol Elaine McCroskey Hall went to God on November 13, 2006.
Once again, she was stuff cookie, a hard lady. But despite all her suffering she bucked up to the end and didn’t take the easy way out. By the way, Notre Dame won 39 to 17.
Assisted Suicide: Some Ambiguous Thoughts
It no longer fits the proverbial slippery slope analogy, that is popular when discussing the corporeality of legally assisted suicide in Canada. In many instances, those proponents of assisted suicide have dropped completely off the cliff in sanctioning government-authorized euthanasia, mercy killing, or assisted suicide. It also comes under the less truculent or aggressive phrase, Medical Assistance in Dying or MAID. Currently, assisted suicide accounts for 1 in 30 deaths in Canada. Outside of Red China and North Korea, places where these numbers are feverishly hidden. Canada’s practice of killing the terminally ill as well as the “not so ill” is frightening. Many of us have this image of assisted suicide as being the last refuge for people suffering from an incurable disease. For the most part that is true. However, it is hardly the whole story. Our neighbor to the North engages in a lot of socio-medical gymnastics to sanitize the real narrative of how their laisse fair attitude toward assisted suicide has deformed itself over the years. To cite the words of one clinical psychologist when discussing government-assisted suicide or MAID. Things often get to a terrible place one tiny step at a time. When Canada allowed mercy killings over six years ago, the practice was limited to those 18 or over with a terminal illness. However, in early 2022, the law was amended to allow assisted suicide for individuals whose natural death was not foreseeable. In addition, Canada removed the ten-day waiting period after a request for assisted suicide was made. Even this has been reduced in some urban areas to same-day petitions. Many physicians and politicians in Ottawa were on board with legislated Bill C-7 which is set to expand MAID beginning in March 2023.
Some Americans (mostly culturally liberal) have always praised or lionized Canada’s vaunted government-run health care system. Yet Americans are unaware that health care has been hyper-secularized over the last four decades. It is based on a cost-benefit analysis. If your medical Quality-Adjusted-Life-Years score (QALY) is deemed inappropriate, many within the medical care system push MAID. Also, Bill C-7 paved the way for those who are mentally ill, depressed, or just having a (bad day, month, or year) to employ the MAID option. There have been several incidents, where teenagers suffering from depression, because they broke up with their male or female friends, were permitted by so-called professional therapists to at least consider MAID. Normally, the parents of such naturally moody adolescents (a descriptive redundancy), had to sign off on these requests. But Bill C-7 also makes it possible for teens to request MAID without their parent’s permission. “Crazy-town Canadian style” has officially been embedded in the Canadian medical community.
Sidebar: In my teen years, I was still suffering from enuresis. I felt really bad about myself and subsequently never had a real girlfriend because I was a chronic bed-wetter. After all, in my way of thinking back then, it’s hard to get a date at 17 or ask a girl out, if you’re still peeing on yourself at night. Maybe I should have had the option of assisted suicide back then since I was clinically depressed. That would have solved all my problems. Right?
Some Canadian Veterans suffering from PTSD, have been encouraged by medical professionals to consider assisted suicide as an option. One Veteran, Christine Gauthier, a paralympic athlete, was advised to consider MAID after requesting a wheelchair ramp for her home. To paraphrase Ms. Gauthier, you are better off dead in Justin Trudeau’s Canada. One has to justify being alive or seeking some expensive procedure, that government-run health officials consider too expensive. For senior citizens in Canada and many other countries, some procedures are just not available once you reach a certain age, factoring in your QALY score. Heart valve and other replacement surgeries are triaged, while the MAID option is not so subtly pushed. In some provinces, you don’t even need a medical doctor to ask for MAID. A nurse, your local pharmacist, or an administrative medical professional can adjudicate a request to kill yourself. Just take recommended death therapeutics. It would save your family and most importantly the government health care system a lot of money. MAID is even pushed by private companies like Simons, which is a women’s fashion outlet. They have sponsored a very slick and heartwarming commercial highlighting MAID. It is a real-life story of an assisted suicide request, complete with a “City of Angels” background, a beach, and people standing around like the Angels in the 1998 Nicolas Cage film. There are bubbles, cellos, floating jellyfish, and the person marketing her own choice for MAID. To quote Tom Cruise in TAPs, it’s beautiful man!
But in all seriousness, it simply celebrates death. It’s Ableism, which is discrimination or social prejudice against people with disabilities or illnesses. It is the medical Rubicon, that the Canadian healthcare system has happily crossed.
As always it is the offspring of this generation of Canadians and Americans to worship themselves as “deep thinkers”. A post-World War II generation of individuals with the unending complicity or proclivity to honor themselves. The late Eric Fromm once observed, that in Western culture, we have a generation who have conveniently replaced God with themselves.
At the beginning of the section, I purposely employed the work ambiguous to call attention to my uncertainties considering assisted suicide. Of course, Carol and I during her long bout with various cancers did not consider it. It was never on our radar. Yet despite what I have said above, is tempered with a tortured ambiguity. It manifests itself as an ongoing, “very loud I don’t know” what is right or wrong in regards to MAID. What I am certain of is the growing trend to discard life whether it be assisted suicide or even abortion. In regards to the latter remember abortion was first sold to the public as something that should be rare, safe, and the last resort. Its devolution into the practice of aborting babies any time before birth should give us all pause. We as a culture, and as so-called civilized nations need to tread lightly and always question ourselves, our motivations, and our very souls.
The legalization of active euthanasia has proved to be controversial throughout the world, with only seven Western countries allowing the practice as of 2022. Belgium and the Netherlands, which have some of the most permissive euthanasia policies in the world, were the first to legalize MAID in 2002. Our neighbors to the North are currently taking it to a whole new murderous level.
From a Judaic Christian perspective, its historical catechesis has largely disapproved of suicide. Our lives belong to God! Our bodies belong to God and not ourselves! As people of the Book, we supposedly believe life is precious including the young, the old, the sick, and the depressed. We also know that we are all sinners, and this reality, this tendency can lead us to some very dark places. Quite simply, humanity apart from God is prone to see life as valuable only, if useful and successful in earthly terms. But every person, even if bedridden and unconscious, is part of God’s plan, is an actor in God’s redemption, and in some ways replicates the suffering of Christ on the cross, whom the world also disdained as useless.
[Patrick is a retired University Library Director. He is graduate of Canisius College and the University of Washington where he earned Masters Degrees in Religious Studies Education, Urban Anthropology and Library and Information Science. Mr. Hall has also completed additional course work at the University of Buffalo, Seattle University and St. John Fishers College of Rochester New York. He has published in several national publications such as Commonweal, America, Conservative Review, Headway, National Catholic Reporter, Freedom's Journal Magazine, and American Libraries. He has published in the peer reviewed publications, Journal of Academic Librarianship and the Internet Reference Services Quarterly. From 1997 until his retirement in January 2014 he served on the Advisory Board of Urban Library Journal, a CUNY Publication.]
Posted in Opinion
Posted in Patrick Hall, Canada, Suicide, cancer, assisted Suicide, euthanasia, #freedomsjournalmagazine, Freedoms Journal Institute, Health care, Death
Posted in Patrick Hall, Canada, Suicide, cancer, assisted Suicide, euthanasia, #freedomsjournalmagazine, Freedoms Journal Institute, Health care, Death
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2024
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