When My Time Comes

Barbara Coombs Lee

PRESIDENT, COMPASSION & CHOICES

Barbara Coombs Lee began her medical career as a candy striper at St. Joseph Hospital in Joliet, Illinois. As she writes in her book, Finish Strong: Putting Your Priorities First at Life s End, she s been working in health care for almost fifty-five years, specializing in intensive care and emergency rooms, caring for very ill patients, helping them stay alive. However, she came to believe in an individual s right to finish life on his or her own terms. She remembers the day: May 19, 1994, the day Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis died of non-Hodgkin s lymphoma.

She writes: Her son, John F. Kennedy, Jr., emerged from her apartment that morning and comforted the crowd that stood grieving on Fifth Avenue. He said, My mother died surrounded by her friends and her family and her books. She did it in her own way and on her own terms. And we all feel lucky for that.

Barbara said that moment motivated her to find a way to avert the suffering that so many undergo at the end of life. She became a public advocate, gaining admission to the Oregon State Bar, and ultimately joining the staff of the Oregon Senate Healthcare and Bioethics Committee. In 1994, the year of her conversion, she became one of the three chief petitioners who filed the Oregon Death with Dignity Act as a citizens initiative. She writes, I spent the next fourteen years defending the resulting Death with Dignity law from efforts to undo it in every governmental arena legislative, executive and judicial.

Oregon s law had been embattled until 2006, when the U.S. Supreme Court finally ruled that states have the authority to adopt medical aid in dying as part of the legitimate practice of medicine.

On February 12, 2019, I interviewed Barbara for my podcast, On My Mind.

I began by asking her about the lessons she had learned from caring for people who had not died well, who had had unwanted treatments and been kept alive against their

John Grisham is the author of forty-seven consecutive #1 bestsellers, which have been translated into nearly fifty languages. His recent books include The Judge's List, Sooley, and his third Jake Brigance novel, A Time for Mercy, which is being developed by HBO as a limited series.
 
Grisham is a two-time winner of the Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction and was honored with the Library of Congress Creative Achievement Award for Fiction.
 
When he's not writing, Grisham serves on the board of directors of the Innocence Project and of Centurion Ministries, two national organizations dedicated to exonerating those who have been wrongfully convicted. Much of his fiction explores deep-seated problems in our criminal justice system.
 
John lives on a farm in central Virginia.