When ‘medical aid in dying’ stops looking like a choice

“Do you know that you’re going to die on Friday?” Brigitte Kranendonk asked her grandmother.

The 83-year-old woman began to cry. “I’ve made a mistake,” Brigitte Stegemann told her granddaughter, according to Kranendonk. She wept for nearly an hour.

This is not compassion if the person about to die cannot make herself understood. It is the machinery of death moving past the one vulnerable human being whose wishes should govern it.

Two days later, on July 10, Stegemann was dead. A physician had administered a lethal injection under Canada’s medical assistance in dying program. The question her family wants answered is as elementary as it is horrifying: Did she understand what was being done to her, and did she freely consent?

The details come from Kranendonk’s account of her