Law gets us there, but love gets us there more quickly

I heard about the deer-hunter in Indiana—by all accounts a fine guy, recently married and baby on the way—who, having fallen from a tree and gravely injured his spine last week, decided he wanted to die, and directed that end to be accomplished. I have learned a lot about spinal cord injuries over the last few months, and I have watched my own son suffer horridly especially in the first weeks following his life-changing neck accident. So, before anything else, I say a prayer for all those in that dark place.

But I also decided to write a blog post about suicide and how one can know, strictly speaking, very little about the facts of a given case, yet still be sure that, no matter what, choosing to die (as opposed to accepting the inevitability of death) is always wrong. I had good arguments at hand, and I was ready to refute, among other things, a emotion-laden point cited in justification of the Indiana man’s decision, namely, “that he would never be able to hug his child.”

I was thinking thru my blog post aloud with Angela and had just quoted to her the sad man’s line about never being able to hug his child—when she cut me off.

“But what about his baby?” she exclaimed, “Now, that poor child will never be able to hug his Dad.” And I scrapped my original post, and decided just to quote my wife.

In amoris facie, quis indiget lege?