No one is a hero who tries to beat God to their appointment with death.

It is hard not to be critical when I hear Big Media and even some of my friends applauding the so-called “bravery” of a girl who committed suicide because she was diagnosed with a terminal disease. Newsflash, folks: we are all going to die eventually! We were each born with a terminal condition called “Humanity.” Some people might develop symptoms that indicate to medical professionals approximately how many months remain but the truth is none of us knows if today is our graduation day. No one is a hero who tries to beat God to their appointment with death. There is a choice concerning death, but it is not in the terms of departure. The choice is in the post-mortem destination.

Two concerns emerge here. First is the horrific idea of “freedom of choice” being applied to mortality. No one has the right to choose death; not their neighbor’s, not their spouse’s, not their own, not their unborn child’s. Murder is wrong every day, always. The second is that if we permit people to self-terminate because of a medical condition, what is to stop us tomorrow from permitting the termination of life for less permanent diagnoses? Or non-medical ones? What next? Organized suicide parties like Carousel in Logan’s Run? This cultural generation that has made Walking Dead the number one show on-air is being programmed to believe that it is okay to kill anything that deviates from a pattern that benefits them.

I have been strongly affected by the suicides and suicide attempts of others. Any notion that suicide affects only the one whose life is terminated is ludicrous. Though the main loss is the surrender of the practitioner’s spiritual outcome, every life is connected to other lives, and every broken connection represents a loss. It is the eternal, irrevocable equivalent of taking your ball and going home just because you don’t like the projected outcome of the game. Anyone who would kill themselves just to keep from dying another way has at least one more day’s worth of growing up to do.

‪#‎suicideprevention‬ ‪#‎chooselife‬