Americans are bold. They like to live out loud, and they like making sure everyone knows what they believe and whether they think everyone else should believe it, too. 

They like to think they’ve got it all figured out, and as obnoxious as that can be, I suppose there’s at least something to be said about being a confident people.

Give us a threat, and we will unite and overcome it. We will start fundraising campaigns, we will do medical and social research, we will scream our causes from the mountain tops, and if necessary, by golly, we will fight wars. We are strong, and we are one.

Until someone brings up the subject of death. More specifically, our own.

Disease, we can handle. Starvation, poverty, hate, crime – these things we can handle. But death itself? Not so much.

When that comes up, we scurry off in a thousand directions, running from the subject, from the danger of having to face our own mortality. We believe we must live and must live forever, and we believe that all others must do the same – we cannot let them discuss death any more than we can discuss it ourselves, because to face their deaths is to face our own, and we just simply can’t do that. 

By the same token, we also assume that if someone wants to die, then something is severely wrong with that person. I’m sure everyone would agree on that, but here is the caveat: what if they have a really, really good reason? 

On Nov. 1, Brittany Maynard, diagnosed with stage 4 glioblastoma – an aggressive brain cancer – took her life in her Oregon home. Maynard’s struggle was highly publicized, and she advocated for assisted suicide until the day she died. After her diagnosis, the 29-year-old explained her choice to die to multiple publications. 

“Even with palliative medication,” Maynard said in an article she wrote for CNN, “I could develop potentially morphine-resistant pain and suffer personality changes and verbal, cognitive and motor loss of virtually any kind… I probably would have suffered in hospice care for weeks or even months. And my family would have had to watch that.

“I did not want this nightmare scenario for my family.” 

She chronicled her path through YouTube videos, in one of which she describes the onset of the deterioration she so feared.

“I had two [seizures] in a day, which was unusual, and I remember looking at my husband’s face at one point and thinking, ‘I know this is my husband, but I can’t say his name,’” she said.

A California resident, Maynard and her husband moved to Oregon so that she could access that state’s Death with Dignity law. Five states have laws allowing    assisted suicide – Washington, Oregon, Montana, Vermont and New Mexico. 

“After months of research,” Maynard said, “my family and I reached a heartbreaking conclusion: There is no treatment that would save my life, and the recommended treatments would have destroyed the time I had left.” 

Maynard’s desire to die sparked controversy across the country – the beautiful newlywed didn’t look sick, and many people thought that her disease was not as bad as she claimed it was. People wrote letters and made their own YouTube videos trying to convince her to live, as horrid as her life would become.

A lot of the resistance to assisted suicide, which relieves the suffering – and exorbitant medical costs – of dying patients may be due to semantics alone.

According to an article published on telegram.com, “a Gallup Poll [showed that] 70 percent of respondents agreed that when patients and their families wanted it, doctors should be allowed to ‘end the patient’s life by some painless means’… Yet in the same 2013 poll, only 51 percent supported allowing doctors to help a dying patient ‘commit suicide.’

“For people to argue against this choice for sick people really seems evil to me,” Maynard told People Magazine. “They try to mix it up with suicide, and that’s really unfair, because there’s not a single part of me that wants to die. But I am dying.”

Maynard’s point is inescapable. She was going to die no matter what. As bizarre as it sounds to those who don’t want to face it, death is personal. Maynard’s choice to die saved her from extraordinary suffering, and it saved her family from the same. It also saved her family ridiculous amounts of medical costs. She died while she was still clear-headed and functional, enjoying the time she had left. She didn’t deteriorate with chemotherapy. She didn’t die a vegetable on life support. 

She died the way she wanted to – at home, with dignity. 

Or, as John Hardwig’s Washington Post headline sums up succinctly: “Brittany Maynard died in a philosophically responsible way. She put others first.” 

It is precisely this “putting others first” that should be considered when discussing assisted suicide. All the talk revolves around the patient, never the patient’s family, trauma or the costs involved. All terminal patients should have the right to decide between themselves and their families how they wish to leave this world. Many have advocated for legalization of assisted suicide. Some have lived long enough to see it become a reality. Others have died trying. We are wrong if we allow those efforts to end in vain.