The Dark Cocoon: Unseen Struggles with MAiD

Snip.

Biting my lip, hazel eyes laser focused, I trimmed and shaped Aunt Wilma’s “Good Luck” card to me from almost two years ago.

Praying for you! You’re going to do great! XOXO. Don’t forget Jesus is crazy about you! Aunt Wilma had written her well wishes in lofty cursive on the brink of my embarkment abroad for graduate studies. At the center of the card was the print of a purplish pink butterfly with black stripes. I laid the card down on my tan bedroom carpet and for a moment it blended in with the swirl of scrapbooking chaos: colorful construction paper, stickers, and miscellaneous items I had bought from Michael’s in a Boxing Day frenzy. I closed my eyes and exhaled from my diaphragm, like my counselor had taught me to do. I picked up the card again and set down my scissors.

When I was about to leave to teach English in Thailand, Aunt Wilma laid a big warm hand on my back. “Let’s pray for her in the name of Jesus! Everyone gather around.” Though my mom was the leader of the weekly ladies Bible study, Aunt Wilma was always the first to call for prayer. “Praise the LORD! Praise the LORD!” Aunt Wilma would exclaim; then she’d rattle off in a heavenly language, her eyes beaming at you in love. She never closed her eyes in prayer. Perhaps it was to keep alert.

For all her intercessory prayer groups, it seemed Aunt Wilma still hadn’t been able to detect the darkness that hit her. She had died over a year ago now. From MAiD. Alone in her apartment. No one from the Bible study she had attended for years had known. None of us, her family, had known. At the time, we didn’t even know what “MAiD” was. We thought it was a cleaning service.

It was “Medical Assistance in Dying,” but no other country calls it that. It was assisted suicide. In my aunt’s case, not euthanasia—not a lethal injection but pills prescribed by a doctor to destroy my aunt that she took on her own. Alone in her apartment.

Don’t forget Jesus is crazy about you! I read the card again. This time some tears trickled out. She had been so good at reminding others. We forgot she needed reminders too.

I picked up my scissors and looked at the purplish pink butterfly. Immediately, I thought of the story I had read in the book Trusting God about the Cecropia moth. Some guy sees a moth struggling to emerge from her cocoon and clips her free, thinking he’s doing the poor thing a favor. What he doesn’t realize is that he has now doomed the moth to hobble the rest of her life. The struggle was what pushed the fluids from her body into her wings, enabling her to fly. The struggle, as painful as it looked and may have been, was a necessary part of her maturation process into a greater degree of freedom and transformation. In the long run, the struggle was meant for empowerment.

Praying for you! You’re going to do great! Aunt Wilma hadn’t known all the reasons I had left for graduate studies. Everyone knew about my broken engagement. What people didn’t know is why Jason had broken up with me. It was messy. It was hell. I couldn’t see the bottom with all the gaslighting, lies, and more lies. My feet couldn’t find ground. At midnight one Wednesday, I asked my mom to drive me to the psych ward.

But that was almost two years ago. Since then, I have seen a counselor. I told wise people about the pain I was experiencing. Since then, I graduated with my master’s degree. My struggle had seemed pointless, but since then, I have experienced healing in ways I didn’t know possible, in ways I didn’t even know I needed, even from childhood trauma. Since then, I have experienced my Heavenly Father so much more. My feet are on the ground now, stable ground.

Everybody in the family had some awareness of Aunt Wilma’s battle with chronic pain. She was often a sunrise of hope and joy, but when her pain and loneliness were especially tough, every word she said was marked by some kind of sour odor like the ammonia-scent of rotting blue cheese. That’s when she’d shortly retreat to Pepper and Caramel, her two cats, close the blinds, and silence her phone. My mom and I would call and call, but the Aunt Wilma she wanted us to see wasn’t home.

During one of those bouts, she applied for MAiD, and then—Aunt Wilma was dead. Just like that.

I slowly began to cut around the butterfly, careful not to clip its wings. What if I hadn’t been drowning in my own problems and I had given Aunt Wilma a card of my own with a butterfly print? What if I had shared my problems with Aunt Wilma? Would that have given her permission to share her private laments too? Then maybe someone could’ve laid a warm hand on her back and fought the spiritual forces of darkness for her. What if MAiD hadn’t been hanging in her face as an easy escape button? Would she be looking back on that dark bout as I looked back on mine, with tears of pain and joy mingling, amazed to discover that the dark period wasn’t a tomb but a cocoon to greater love?

I inserted the butterfly in a plastic sleeve next to a photo of Aunt Wilma and me from my elementary school days. Aunt Wilma would’ve been fifty-seven this year. None of us will know what God wanted to do in the dark of her suffering, what beauty He desired to bring forth because she was now dead. Gone. She was with the LORD, but was that the way He had wanted her to enter His presence? I exhaled from my diaphragm again. Her death just didn’t fit the triumphant spirit I knew she had from fighting chronic pain for decades. If only a set of eyes had been open, beaming love at her. If only, she had been willing to receive love…

I looked down at the tan carpet, and I exhaled from my diaphragm once more. All the colorful pieces of construction paper blurred in a swirl again.