My father and sister sat, and I stood against the wall, in the tiny room where my mother shifted on the exam table’s crinkly paper. Mom suffered silently with autoimmune diseases, and one of those monsters, scleroderma, scarred her lungs, providing a foothold for the cancer that was eating her. The oncologist, arms folded across his chest, dropped his hands and moved nearer Mom. He delivered the answer to the question foremost in our minds. “Three to six months.”

There it was, her estimated timeline.

I began regularly traveling the eight hundred miles to my parents’ home. Just days after one visit, Dad called. “You need to come back.” I caught a flight, then drove a rental car as fast as I dared. Mom was still conscious when I arrived, though in mounting pain and unable to speak. Her eyes lifted a fraction, and a hint of a smile passed her lips. The hospice nurse stood ready with morphine and immediately dosed my mother into unconsciousness. No longer could Mom conceal the ravages of her body.

The hospice nurse, leaving until the next day, instructed us how to administer morphine and repeatedly told me that I could not possibly overdose my mother. The nurse’s repetition seemed odd, because surely a person could overdose on morphine, but years passed before I realized the obvious. The nurse had hinted a quicker end to Mom’s misery, a method to speed time for us by cutting off the end of her time.

If I had realized what the nurse meant, would I have ended Mom’s life sooner? I know Christianity teaches that euthanasia is wrong: that it is for God, the giver of life, and not for us to choose when a life should end. But now I also better understand why euthanasia is becoming increasingly accepted and legalized (Washington, Oregon, California, Vermont, and Montana currently allow euthanasia, as do several other countries). To end a person’s suffering seems a mercy. And does the exact time of death really matter that much?

Looking back on those difficult days, there are other reasons I’m glad I didn’t cut short that time with my mother. Sitting with Mom while she struggled for each breath, I inhaled an ocean of air, as if my breathing could help her. If I had hurried the process, my motivation would have been as much for me as for her. But I would have missed out on some powerful truths which that dragging time taught me.

One of these truths, the concreteness of sin and death, imprinted itself on me progressively deeper through the hours I sat with Mom. With each passing minute, my mind insisted, “Death, is wrong, wrong, wrong.” I realized that humankind’s selfish willfulness produced this consequence, this destruction that has wormed its sick ruin into every facet of creation until it wreaks its worst outcome. This truth would not have had as much impact if Mom’s dying process were cut short, nice and tidy-like.

Another truth materialized as I waited for her death: my own mortality. Potent questions confronted me: Will I be ready? How much time do I have, and what am I going to do with it?

Allowing death to progress at its own, slow rate benefited me, despite the distress, but what about my mother’s perspective? I am certain that my presence communicated worth to her. In effect I said, “Mom, suffering with you is tearing me up, but you are worth it. You are immeasurably valuable, and I want to spend every last second with you that I can.” Maybe this reassurance was something she needed to take with her.

What would euthanasia have communicated to her? Would she be grateful and understand that I did it in mercy, or would she interpret my actions as ending my own pain and inconvenience?

I know I don’t want to suffer at the time of my death, but what if I cannot, until that moment, fully comprehend the finality of leaving earth? What if I change my mind, like people backing out at the top of a zip line? What if time is creeping by for those around my deathbed but is racing for me, and I want to cling to every scrap of life possible?

We are equipped with an intense drive for self-preservation, arguably the most dominant instinct. In the deaths I have witnessed, the dying were trapped in their bodies, too weak to communicate. If they were euthanized, they might silently scream without our knowing, “No! I changed my mind.”

My local newspaper recently told the story of a woman who shot herself in the head. “A lifetime of self-hate from abuse built up” until her will to end her misery overcame her drive for life. She survived her suicide attempt, but lost her vision from the wound. Six years later, she took up dancing, massage therapy, and speaking to school children about “what it is to be blind.” In her words, “God was speaking to me and kept me alive for a reason. I want it to be known I’m alive and that there’s a reason I’m here.”

This woman attempted to manipulate her time of death but failed. Now she lives a life of thankful giving back to society, the same society that had driven her to the point of wanting to click her stopwatch with finality. She thought she knew what she wanted but did not realize her mistake until she pulled the trigger.

Dying is being birthed into another world. We hurry babies’ births and schedule them when most convenient, but does something biologically beneficial to the infant and emotionally cathartic for the mother happen during natural birth? What if the dying process, though also painful, likewise contains benefits for the dying person that are only possible through the passage of time, time for thought enlightened precisely at the precipice of death? Perhaps a person’s entire life flashes before her. We cannot know, with certainty, the exact thoughts inside another person’s mind, especially during death. If life is prematurely extinguished, the dying might be robbed of time needed to process life’s end.

As I think back on those last hours with my mother, I consider Jesus’ crucifixion, a most excruciating manner to die. Would it have been better had the guards gone earlier to break Jesus’ legs and ended his suffering?

The day before his execution, Jesus told his disciples that his time was near. He knew that God had designated a specific time for him to die. Did God determine a particular time for my Mom to die? If, as Psalm 139 says, God writes all of the days ordained for us before any of them come to be, then he ordains our last day as well.

When Jesus hung, suffocating on a cross, he had meaningful exchanges. He entrusted his mother’s care to a disciple. This act fulfilled his responsibility, as his mother’s oldest son, to care for her. She heard his words, knowing he thought of her in the costly last moments of his life. The disciple received the love bestowed through the honor of being entrusted with such a sacred responsibility.

In another exchange, Jesus assured a dying criminal that he would enter heaven. This criminal reached out with faith, and Jesus gave him forgiveness, peace, and eternal life.

Jesus completed his last exchange in his final breath. He announced, “It is finished.” These words are the gospel. Jesus lived a sinless life, paying the debt incurred by our sins, debt beyond our capability of repaying. He knew he would rise and wholly destroy that foul worm, death. Would Jesus’ mission be finished if his time were severed by others, instead of his giving up his spirit in his own time?

Pain is horrible, but pain ends. Regret can never be satisfied. Taking advantage of other family members’ dozing, I held Mom’s hand and stroked her arm. I whispered that her life inspired me. I told her that her listening without judgment, her quietly giving to people in need, and her not allowing herself to complain moved me to live differently. I wept for forgiveness for being insensitive and not bringing my children more often to visit.

Did Mom regret our communion during those minutes because of pain? If I had ended her life early, I would have regretted it. For one, I could not have spoken those secrets, and would always have wondered what I cut short, what I stole from her in those closing moments of earthly existence. Mostly though, despite what the law and medical profession might allow, I know her life was not mine or anyone else’s to take except God’s alone, who gave it to her.

Perhaps the last natural moments on earth held the clock-ticks that allowed my mother, like Jesus, his mother, his disciple, and the criminal, to extend love, to express faith, to forgive or be forgiven, and to look into God’s face.