I recently read news about a British woman named Wendy Duffy, who died in April at an assisted suicide clinic in Switzerland. Duffy’s son, Marcus, passed away some four years ago in a freak accident at their home. Since then, Duffy said, she has wanted to join him in death. She attempted suicide once and was almost in a permanent coma. After that, she explained to journalists, she decided to travel to Switzerland to be sure to die as she wished.

The reasoning that Duffy gave for her decision was straightforward and heartbreaking. Without her son, she explained, she had lost the will to live. And there was nothing anybody could do to dissuade her from the course of action she had chosen, she insisted. “My life,” she emphasized, “my choice.”

At the assisted suicide clinic, many media outlets reported, Duffy, and not a physician or clinic attendant, was required to turn with her own hands the valve allowing the death-dealing chemicals to flow into her veins. In accordance with Swiss law, the suicidal person, and no one else, must complete the final, finalizing act of his or her earthly existence.

But in this care taken with the will of the suicidal victim, this deference to a self-destructive volition, can be seen the refutation of suicidal logic. It is not just a legal technicality that no one but Wendy Duffy was allowed to end her life. No matter how much Duffy might have asked to be killed, almost every other human being, with the possible exception of the criminally insane, would have hesitated to grant her wish. This is because, at the core of our being, we know that the will and the life are not in an equal relationship. The will may claim primacy over the life-force. The will can, indeed, cut life short, as Duffy’s case sadly demonstrates. But the fact is that life is prior to the will, and infinitely beyond it in stature. When the will forces its whims onto life, life yields, but that does not change the superiority of life to the will. The inversion of this hierarchy is the grotesqueness of suicide.

“My life, my choice.” When Wendy Duffy glibly told a reporter that her life was her choice, she was speaking both the truth and a falsehood at the same time. Yes, as events bore out, Duffy’s life was subject to her choice, meaning her will. But that does not mean that Duffy’s life was *her* life. Wendy Duffy was willed into existence, but not by her. Although her parents were the proximate cause, Duffy’s life was willed into existence by God. Her life was not hers to do with as she wanted. Her life was hers only to cherish and to live. The reason that she loved her son and mourned his death, namely that he was irreplaceable and clothed in a dignity that no human could fashion, was also the reason that she should not have taken her own life. It is true that Duffy had a choice. It is not true, however, that all choices are equal.

The life we have is not our own. The life we have is an unearned, unfathomable gift, which comes with the condition that we are to use it, not for ourselves, but for others. This orientation of the life-force away from the person to whom it gives life is a mute confession of the otherness of the life we are all given. It is why we shall not murder (including murdering ourselves). It is why the Swiss doctors and nurses stopped short of dripping poison into Wendy Duffy’s bloodstream. It is why there are multiple psychiatric examinations prior to the suicide, so that doctors and legislators and everyone else involved, remotely or directly, can be sure that their will has not mixed with and influenced the will of the suicide.

It is also why those who do the grim work of pulling switches for electric chairs work in groups, with only one switch electrified, so that the act of taking a life will be separated from the will. And it is why we catch our breath, awe-struck, when someone lays down his life for another. The will in each of us acts according to a higher purpose when it moves to give back the life-gift for the good of someone whose own life is in danger. The will is an interloper in our lives. It moves us, but what it moves is not, in the final analysis, ours. The will either recognizes that the vehicle it drives, the life it moves here and there, is borrowed, or it oversteps its place and goes where it ought not to go. The will quails at killing because life is a sacred thing, a thing that we know intuitively must be consecrated by sacrifice–of life itself, or of the will. Everything else, such as Wendy Duffy’s plea that her life was hers to do with as she wished, falls far short of what life is and why we have it to begin with.

That Wendy Duffy lost the will to live I do not doubt for a second. In our grief, our pain, our brokenness, we all sometimes face the terrible choice between a living and an actual death. Whether we give up the will and respect the sacred otherness of life, or let the will take life and so transgress the dignity that comes from infinitely outside ourselves, is up to us. But the life-force itself, the gift we have been given–that is not, under any circumstances, ours to do with as we please.