CV NEWS FEED // A Canadian who lost his father, John Patrick Tylor Lyon, to “medical assistance in dying” (MAiD) shared in a recent interview about the devastating effects that legalized euthanasia has on both the person who dies and the family left behind.
“My opposition to euthanasia is not speculative, it’s not abstract,” Christopher Lyon said in an interview Amanda Achtman, a Catholic Canadian anti-MAiD activist, published March 3. “It is experiential, because I watched doctors kill my father in front of my family, on a family member’s birthday.”
Lyon said his father was an affectionate, jovial, and loving parent who also struggled in some ways. When Lyon was a teenager, he heard his father make comments about “drifting off” on a canoe and never returning. His father also spoke about deaths he had seen when he served as a policeman. Lyon said in a post on his Substack, which includes commentary on euthanasia and medically assisted suicide, that his father was a police officer in the 1960s and 1970s.
Lyon told Achtman that “it wasn’t until years later that I saw that as indicative of somebody who’s deeply traumatized or deeply depressed.”
Even before Canada legalized euthanasia in 2016, Lyon said he was worried that his father would commit suicide.
“And so when MAiD came along, it was the perfect flattery. It’s telling him suicide is okay,” Lyon told Achtman. “It’s telling him it’s dignity, it’s somehow even beautiful.”
Canada expanded MAiD eligibility to people with non-terminal illnesses in 2021. Lyon’s father, who suffered from chronic conditions including arthritis and diabetes, applied.
Lyon said his father’s MAiD assessor called the family just two days before he was “scheduled to die,” so they needed to act fast if they wanted to see him. Lyon said he tried to help and worked to get an emergency psychiatric evaluation for his father. A copy of that evaluation, which he obtained after his father’s death, was error-ridden, Lyons told Achtman. It lists that his father was not suicidal, and that his father “didn’t think he was depressed,” and yet documented that he was on antidepressants.
Lyon was in the room when the doctor euthanized his father, who was 77. He told Achtman that he was sitting beside the doctor when his father received the lethal drugs.
“A few seconds before, he’d been animated,” Lyon said. “And then he was a corpse.”
Lyon said it was the worst day of his life.
All of the family members that day, he said, were “trying to make sense of a situation that defies sense.”
Lyon told Achtman that he is moved to speak out about this loss, and said that sharing experiences can help support others in a society that has normalized euthanasia. Besides the person who dies from MAiD, family members are affected the most by euthanasia, he said, as they “have to live with the grief.”
He said that he is now a part of a suicide support group and people in this type of group recognize MAiD as suicide.
MAiD is the fifth leading cause of death in Canada.
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