I
It seems oddly and sadly fitting that one of my first exposures to the world outside my small-town existence was the court cases surrounding Robert Latimer’s homicide of his daughter Tracy.
It is likely one of the appeals in the late 1990s, rather than the first trial, that I remember. But even at my young age, details of the case stuck in my memory: The Latimers were Saskatchewan farmers, like my own extended family scattered across the Canadian prairies. Tracy lived with cerebral palsy, like two peers at my elementary school. And Tracy was twelve years old when her father ended her life on October 24, 1993, not much older than I was.
Granted, some details didn’t register. I had no idea, for instance, what “youth in Asia” had to do with Tracy’s murder. (I figured it out eventually.)
It is likely thanks to my mother that I knew about the case at all. Long before e-petitions and viral social media posts, the mighty form letter reigned. Many people signed and sent form letters, calling on policy-makers to maintain the rule of law and hold Robert Latimer to account for killing Tracy. I helped my mom, who organized such letter-writing efforts locally, by photocopying and collating form letters to be signed.
The case stayed with me as I grew older, and not merely because it would pop up in the media and public consciousness periodically, usually surrounding a parole application for Latimer. This homicide was not treated like other cases: Was it murder, or was it mercy? Public discourse was divided.
The Murder of Tracy Latimer
Tracy’s father argued that it was mercy.
Tracy was shortly to receive surgery for a dislocated hip. As reflected in the court judgments, Robert Latimer viewed these surgeries as “mutilations.”
After the doctor’s visit during which the surgery was discussed, Latimer made the decision to end Tracy’s life. He told police he had considered giving Tracy Valium or “shooting her in the head” but ultimately opted for carbon dioxide, creating a gas chamber within his truck cab. Two days before the scheduled surgery, while the rest of the family was at church, he set up the truck and placed Tracy inside. After he was sure of her death, he returned Tracy to her bed, leaving his wife to find her body when she returned home from church.
Robert Latimer’s priority, as recorded by the police, was “to put her out of her pain.” Years and years later, he has stood by this rationale.
Latimer went to trial in November 1994, convicted by the jury of second-degree murder. The judge sentenced him to life without the possibility of parole for ten years—the mandatory minimum. This conviction was upheld on appeal, but in 1997 the Supreme Court of Canada ordered a retrial due to some irregularities in jury formation.
On retrial late in 1997, the jury likewise found Latimer guilty of second-degree murder but recommended a more lenient sentence. Despite the mandatory minimum, the judge granted a constitutional exemption, sentencing Latimer to only one year of prison and one year of probation. The appeals court reversed this decision, restoring the mandatory minimum sentence. The conviction and sentence were then upheld at the Supreme Court in 2001.
But the court cases and every parole hearing were media magnets and lightning rods for polarized opinion. There was furor over the prosecution of Robert Latimer and over the “severity” of his sentence. And there was furor over the judge’s light sentencing at the retrial and over the broad sympathy shown to the killer—rather than to his victim.
“A Bundle of Unending Suffering”
Tracy herself is often lost in the media coverage, except as “merely a bundle of unending suffering,” as disability scholar Heidi Janz says. Immobility, seizures, complete dependency, and constant pain were at the centre of the media’s characterization of Tracy’s life, drowning out the testimony in court from members of her care team and community, who recounted that Tracy was a happy girl with preferences and personality.
Janz says that “by conflating suffering with cerebral palsy, the authors [of mainstream media news coverage] imply that suffering is an inherent element of cerebral palsy and that the more severe the disability, the greater the suffering.” She contrasts the media presentations of the surgeries as seemingly futile torture sessions with medical literature on the goals and efficacy of the procedures. Even the daily log of Tracy’s own mother chronicling her daughter’s activities and well-being after an earlier spinal surgery contradicts the image of Tracy as bed-bound or in unending pain.
Tracy’s orthopaedic surgeon testified at Robert Latimer’s trial that the scheduled surgery was intended to relieve pain, which it is usually very effective at doing. The courts also noted that the Latimers had rejected the possibility of Tracy receiving a feeding tube, which they saw as overly intrusive. But the court described the feeding tube as “an option that would have improved her nutrition and health, and that might also have allowed for more effective pain medication to be administered.”
Tracy’s story has reverberated through the years. Amid news in 2018 that Robert Latimer was applying for a pardon or a new trial, my friend Taylor Hyatt, who lives with cerebral palsy, published an essay reflecting on the impact of Tracy’s story on her:
And now, many years later, the fears and prejudices involving disability that surrounded the Latimer case have not dissipated, argues Hyatt. Rather, “legal euthanasia and assisted suicide now offer a socially-sanctioned escape from those negative messages [about disability]; the procedures are prompting a startling shift in our country’s view of disability, death, the definition of ‘suffering’ and how much of it someone can live with.”
“Assistance” in Dying?
Euthanasia and assisted suicide are legal in Canada as medical assistance in dying, or MAiD, an ambiguous term that obscures its reality: the physician or nurse practitioner directly and intentionally ending the patient’s life with a lethal cocktail of drugs.
Although self-administered MAiD (or assisted suicide) is technically available in Canada, there are only a handful of such cases each year; 99.9 percent of MAiD deaths are clinician-administered, or active euthanasia. This stands in stark contrast to the assisted suicide available in a growing number of US states, where patients must self-ingest the lethal medication prescribed by the doctor.
Although self-administered MAiD (or assisted suicide) is technically available in Canada, there are only a handful of such cases each year; 99.9 percent of MAiD deaths are clinician-administered, or active euthanasia.
Canada’s courts struck down the prohibition against physician-assisted dying in 2015, with Parliament legislating an exemption in the Criminal Code in 2016: Physicians and nurse practitioners were now not criminally liable for euthanasia or assisted suicide when performing it under certain conditions. A dramatic expansion in 2021 opened MAiD to those who were not dying. Those whose “deaths were not reasonably foreseeable” were now eligible.
Disability advocacy organizations had been vocal against assisted dying already, but they described this expansion and its ongoing fallout as an existential threat to Canadians living with disabilities. A recent report from Cardus analyzes the evidence of these impacts, finding a disproportionate impact of MAiD on Canadians living with disabilities and a system that diverges significantly from the court’s and legislation’s original promises of a well-regulated, safeguarded regime.
A coalition of disability organizations and individual plaintiffs is currently challenging this aspect of the MAiD law in the courts, arguing that allowing MAiD for those whose deaths are not reasonably foreseeable is discriminatory. One of the leaders in this coalition describes the law’s “devastating message that life with a disability is a fate worse than death.”
It’s not a new message—but now it is a message within the law.
“I Wouldn’t Want to Live Like That”
It’s not hard to see the message that disability is a fate worse than death play out in our culture, not just in our movies or TV shows, or in offhand comments or glib jokes, but also deep within our own hearts.
A New York Times feature on beloved Canadian children’s author Robert Munsch describes his decision to receive medical assistance in dying as a result of his dementia. The storyteller described “losing himself” to dementia as becoming “a turnip” or leaving his wife “stuck” with him “being a lump.”
Research and literature speak of a “disability paradox,” where non-disabled persons will assume a disabled person has a lower quality of life than the person living with the disability herself. “I wouldn’t want to live like that,” goes the logic, and therefore the non-disabled person opts to receive a premature death through MAiD, to spare themselves the “indignity” of changing capacities due to disease or disability. Or, for a rising number of MAiD recipients each year, the suffering of feeling like a burden.
These fears can be particularly potent at the point of diagnosis, before a patient has adapted and understands what life will look like going forward. But research shows that patients—such as those who experience a traumatic injury causing a disability—generally do adjust and adapt, usually within six to twelve months, and go on to enjoy a meaningful life. Beyond this process of psychosocial adjustment, though, the patient’s perception of their environment, including of available supports, accessibility, and social views of disability, also can influence how quickly that adjustment can occur—if at all. Disability biases are prevalent among physicians and can affect the care they provide. How much more may this influence physicians in their conversations and assessments with patients about MAiD?
The availability of MAiD is such that a patient doesn’t always have the time to adapt. Or someone might find themselves without adequate support for life’s necessities, having to fight with a system for their care or basic services. They may wait years and years for a wheelchair ramp but could receive a MAiD death on the same or next day as their request and assessment. In the haunting words of Sathya Dhara Kovac’s self-authored obituary, “ultimately it was not a genetic disease that took me out, it was a system.”
If I’m honest with myself, I can find those fears living within my own heart as well: If I am quick to despair because of my present suffering, how will I cope if and when my physical and mental capacities change, or some new suffering presents itself? Because while I would never question the dignity of another’s life, regardless of their capacities or circumstances, I know I can struggle to believe in my own.
From Dreams to Nightmares
It was Canadian Thanksgiving of 2018, my Thanksgiving with my husband. We had hoped to share news of a positive pregnancy test with my family, whom we were visiting in my rural hometown. But it was negative.
Much to my husband’s bewilderment, I quickly catastrophized, imagining how excruciating every month would be, a never-ending cycle of hope and bitter disappointment. It was much too soon to be jumping to a worst-case scenario, and I knew that then, just as I do now. But I was still overwhelmed: “I can’t do this. I can’t live like this, month after month, year after year. I just can’t.”
And yet I have. It has even been worse than I had imagined. The disappointments, the invasive testing, the surgical procedures, the miscarriage. Each building onto the others, layers upon layers of heartbreak.
But just over two years ago, it all seemed to have meant something. Every prayer seemed to be answered. “God’s perfect timing,” everyone said.
It had finally happened—after years of waiting and hoping for an adoption match, we had been chosen. Our joy was mixed, knowing the biological parents were facing their own grief, but they had chosen us to parent this precious tiny child. We named her Helena, and as we held her in the hospital, all that we had gone through finally seemed worth it.
I hardly slept that first night of being her mom, jolting awake at every noise she made. And it was pure bliss. The future looked so bright.
But the next afternoon, as we made plans to drive back home, the lawyer called. Every nightmare was realized in that moment: Helena’s biological parents had changed their minds.
The drive back from northern Ontario in late October is filled with long stretches of pine trees and naked maples. My husband drove, tense with anger and pain. I was a puddle. The empty car seat in the back was a cruel monument to our pain.
Despite many years of living with depression, I had never experienced a desire to die as I did on that drive back. I prayed, reminiscent of the biblical Job, “that it would please God to crush me,” but with a Canadian twist—that a moose or deer would dart across the road and end it all. Because I couldn’t live like this.
But the wildlife declined to intervene, and we were left to return home to clear out baby clothes, bassinets, and all our hopes and dreams.
and what I dread befalls me.
I am not at ease, nor am I quiet;
I have no rest, but trouble comes. (Job 3:25–26)
Removing the Roof
In the book of Job, Job’s friends are . . . less than helpful, with their “windy words” offering “miserable comfort” (Job 16:2–3).
Thankfully, I have better friends. But for those who have, with the best of intentions, offered encouraging words about God’s will and his good plans for us, I have smiled sadly and asked them to hold on to that belief for me. Because I can’t.
Where my own faith is too fragile, I must rely on the faith of my friends and family. Where I am paralyzed by anger and fear, they need to carry me. Like the paralyzed man in the Scriptures whose friends cannot get to Jesus (Mark 2:3–11), I am reliant on others to remove the roof and lower me down.
Two years after the adoption reversal, there’s been no bittersweet resolution for my husband and me: no adoptions, no miraculous pregnancies—only more losses, painful anniversaries, and an impending realization that the life and family we had imagined, longed for, prayed for, hoped beyond hope for, is going to look different. Nor do we know whether baby Helena is well, or even what her name is.
I’m not wishing for deadly moose interventions anymore, but I’m still working through the grief (in case that wasn’t abundantly clear) of a life that, to borrow another phrase from Job, can often feel loathsome (Job 10:1).
I am still at work, at a job centred almost entirely on death and dying. Researching euthanasia and assisted suicide, palliative care, social isolation, and loneliness: the topics that bum out my colleagues at the lunch table and force me to live in the tension between my head and my heart.
Despite the medicalization of death and dying, there is no medicine or therapy that can fully control it. It is not a technical problem to solve with a technocratic solution.
My head can research and advocate for policies that promote the common good and critique those that undermine it. My head can be rooted in principles of human dignity, humans made in the image and likeness of God. But, for better or for worse, my head must coexist with a heart that feels abandoned and alone.
So I’ll cite the research on morbidity and mortality risks posed by social isolation and loneliness—look, here’s the very report I wrote on the subject—but I also occasionally browse rural real estate listings, wishing I could cut myself off from everyone and from every $!%&ing pregnancy announcement, reinventing myself as a pygmy goat farmer with an ever-increasing number of small fluffy dogs.
I’ll make the policy arguments against Canada’s impending 2027 expansion of MAiD for those with mental illness as a sole underlying condition, while also getting it when reading the media accounts of those anxiously waiting for it and for a way out of their mental illness and pain.
Despite a tendency to catastrophize in my personal life, I believe in our work toward a hopeful future and in the evidence and research we put behind every policy memo or research report.
Toward Solidarity
There is an urgent need to improve and enhance the way our public institutions respond to suffering, not merely because their inadequacies in providing assistance in living may drive Canadians toward “assistance” in dying. Comprehensive and timely access to palliative care, mental-health resources, and other medical services, including disability supports, may temper the demand for MAiD.
Catholic social teaching, in Pope John Paul II’s encyclical letter Sollicitudo Rei Socialis, describes solidarity not as a “feeling of vague compassion or shallow distress at the misfortunes of so many people, both near and far. On the contrary, it is a firm and persevering determination to commit oneself to the common good. That is to say to the good of all and of each individual, because we are all really responsible for all.”
This solidarity, explains bioethicist Cory Andrew Labrecque,
Yet I also know that, in this life, our communities, our health-care systems, our social security nets, our churches, and our families will never perfectly respond to all suffering—even if all Cardus’s policy recommendations were perfectly put into place. This is because, despite the medicalization of death and dying, there is no medicine or therapy that can fully control it. It is not a technical problem to solve with a technocratic solution. Suffering will remain in this world, prompting questions themselves that, lacking satisfactory answers, can produce further suffering.
Solidarity is most deeply revealed in the life and death of Jesus Christ. Catholic social doctrine describes how he “takes on the infirmities of his people, walks with them, saves them and makes them one.” Gethsemane was not a pep rally; rather, we find Christ asking to be spared this cup of suffering and pleading with his friends: “I am deeply grieved, even to death; remain here, and stay awake with me” (Matthew 26:38). But his friends failed, leaving him alone with his pain.
Would our fears loom as large if we knew the care and community we needed would always be there, no matter what?
If our communities were full of homes and workplaces and hearts that were built to welcome life in its complexity and varying mobility, capability, and cognition?
If our culture celebrated unwaveringly the value of all human life, recognizing both the inherent vulnerability of every human being and the specific vulnerabilities we face at different stages of our lives or because of different capabilities?
If our neighbours, friends, and family kept on showing up, even when we said we were fine, and even when they didn’t know what to say?
With such solidarity in place, our fears of living “like this” or “like that” weigh less heavily, if only because we know we are not alone. Even in the moments when we cannot bear our fears, when they paralyze us, we have those who remove the roof for us, bringing us to care and to the Carer.
