My husband, John, was lying there, frail but perfectly lucid, with our priest at his side, ready to administer the last rites. Doctors had discovered in him an aggressive form of cancer that had, by that time, spread throughout his body. The priest had communion bread in his hand, and a chalice of wine was sitting on John’s bedside table. There was a kind of quiet, holy stillness in the room. Then a young doctor walked in, looked at the chart, looked at John, looked at me, and delivered this line as though he were reading from a script: “I am required by law to offer you MAID.”
I had heard of MAID—medical assistance in dying—once or twice before, but now I was facing it up close. A doctor offered it to John within minutes of his arrival at the hospital, 10 days prior. He had declined it then, and he declined it again, just as calmly: “No, thank you.”
Our priest said nothing, though his brow furrowed slightly. He turned to the work he had come to do: He anointed my husband, said his prayers, and gave him the last rites. John died 48 hours later.
In my home country of Canada, MAID has grown rapidly since it was legalized in 2016; it represented 4.7 percent of all Canadian deaths in 2023, which translates to about 15,340 lives ended through assisted suicide. After my husband died, I began to see MAID everywhere I looked. A couple of friends in their 80s told me they’d been offered it during hospital visits. In the local newspaper obituaries, I began to spot euphemisms like “died by her own choice.” We all know what that means now.
Still, I thought John’s passing would be my last personal brush with MAID. I was wrong.
