The Euthanasia Prevention Coalition is a secular organization but for the sake of the adherents to the Orthodox Christian faith and those who are interested in the Orthodox Christian perspective we are re-publishing this statement.
A Christian Ending to Our Life
A Pastoral Letter of the Holy Synod of Bishops of the Orthodox Church in America on Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia
To the Venerable Clergy, Monastics, and Faithful of the Orthodox Church in America:
Beloved children in the Lord,
At every Divine Liturgy we ask the Lord for “a Christian ending to our life, painless, blameless, and peaceful, and a good defense before the dread judgment seat of Christ.” We have prayed these words more times than we can count. We ask you now to hear them again, because the world around us has begun to offer a very different kind of ending.
In Canada, where many of our parishes live and serve, and in a growing number of American states, the law now permits physicians to prescribe, and in some places to administer, lethal drugs to the sick at their request. Whether it is called “medical assistance in dying,” “death with dignity,” physician-assisted suicide, or euthanasia, it is increasingly presented to the sick and their families as an act of mercy. Many of you have asked us for guidance: clinicians who face these questions in their daily work, and families who have faced them at the bedside of someone they love.
We write to you first as pastors. Each of us has stood beside hospital beds and open graves. We have buried the elderly after long illness, and children whose lives had scarcely begun. We have stood with families whose grief seemed too heavy for any heart to carry. We do not speak of suffering from a distance. But we have also seen, again and again, that the hour of death can be filled with prayer, with reconciliation, and even with joy, and that no one who suffers need suffer alone.
What we offer here is not a new teaching. It is what the Church has received from her Lord, and what this Holy Synod affirmed in 1992: that every human person, “young and old, sick and healthy, rich and poor, powerful and weak,” is “eternally precious in God’s sight.”
I. Our Life Is Not Our Own
Our life is not something we possess but something we continually receive from God, who breathed into us the breath of life (Gen 2:7). “For none of us liveth to himself, and no man dieth to himself. For whether we live, we live unto the Lord; and whether we die, we die unto the Lord: whether we live therefore, or die, we are the Lord’s” (Rom 14:7–8).
The dignity of a human person does not rest on strength, independence, or usefulness. It rests on the image of God, which is no less present in one who lies dying than in one who is in the fullness of health. This matters greatly today, for many who ask for an assisted death do so less because of pain than because they fear losing their independence, becoming a burden, or no longer being able to do the things that gave their lives meaning. These fears are real, and we do not dismiss them. But the Gospel answers them: a person’s worth is not measured by what he can still do.
One of us remembers visiting a young girl whose illness was slowly taking from her the music she loved, until she could no longer sing or play. She was not bitter. Shortly before her death she wrote of the snow falling outside her window, and of how beautiful it was. Her joy did not come from her suffering, and it did not make her suffering good. It came from God, who was with her in it, and it taught everyone who knew her what a human life is worth.
II. God Does Not Will Our Suffering
“For God made not death: neither hath he pleasure in the destruction of the living” (Wis 1:13). The Church does not teach that suffering is good in itself, nor that God sends illness as a punishment. When the friends of Job insisted that his afflictions must be the penalty for some hidden sin, it was they whom God rebuked (Job 42:7). When the Lord walked among us, He healed every sickness and every disease, and at the tomb of His friend Lazarus, “Jesus wept” (Jn 11:35). God does not will the suffering of men. To relieve pain is therefore to share in Christ’s own work, and to ask for such relief is no failure of faith.
Yet there are sufferings that cannot be taken away, and it is precisely there that Christ meets us. He did not remain outside our pain; He took it upon Himself, even to the Cross, so that it might become a place where God is found. The Apostle Paul, who three times asked to be delivered from his affliction, heard the Lord answer: “My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness” (2 Cor 12:9). Whatever good comes to us in suffering comes not from the suffering itself but from the grace of God, received in patience and prayer.
Nor is it faithless to grow weary of life. The Prophet Elijah lay down under a juniper tree and said, “It is enough; now, O Lord, take away my life” (1 Kings 19:4). God did not rebuke him. He sent His angel with bread and water, saying, “Arise and eat; because the journey is too great for thee” (1 Kings 19:7). Job cursed the day of his birth, yet refused the counsel to “curse God, and die” (Job 2:9–10). The longing for death, the fear of pain, and the dread of dependence are to be brought honestly to God in prayer and shared with one’s priest and physicians, not acted upon. God answers them, as He answered Elijah, with nourishment and with His presence, very often through the hands of His people.
III. What the Church Cannot Bless
In physician-assisted suicide, a clinician provides lethal drugs so that a patient may end his own life. In euthanasia, a clinician administers them for the purpose of causing death. The term “medical assistance in dying” is used in civil law for one or both. The Church looks not to the name given to an act but to what the act is. In each case, death itself is deliberately brought about as the remedy for suffering.
The commandment of God is plain: “Thou shalt not kill” (Ex 20:13). “I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life” (Deut 30:19). The deliberate taking of one’s own life, and the taking of another’s life at his request, are contrary to the Gospel of Christ, who came “that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly” (Jn 10:10). With our brother bishops of the Assembly of Canonical Orthodox Bishops of the United States of America, we affirm that the Church “cannot and does not condone any form of euthanasia.” Assisted suicide, by whatever name it is known, cannot be blessed by the Church in any way.
We speak here of acts, not of the hearts of those who suffer. Many who ask for death do so in pain, in fear, in exhaustion, or in the grip of despondency, and the judgment of the heart belongs to God alone. But the Church must speak the truth in love (Eph 4:15), for to call death a healing would be to abandon the sick at the very moment they most need the hope of Christ.
IV. What the Church Blesses
“Honour a physician … for the Lord hath created him” (Sir 38:1). The care of the sick has always been the Church’s own work, from St. Basil’s house for the sick at Caesarea to St. Herman nursing the dying of Kodiak.
The relief of pain. Because we pray for a painless end, the Church blesses the careful use of medicines to relieve pain, breathlessness, anxiety, and every other distress of the dying, given in proportion to the patient’s need. The purpose of such care is to relieve the sufferer, not to end his life, and that purpose makes it entirely different from euthanasia, even at the very end.
The limits of treatment. In 1992 this Holy Synod called the faithful to find “the ‘royal path’ between providing all necessary healing measures and merely prolonging the biological functioning of organs.” When a treatment no longer offers reasonable hope of benefit, or its burdens have become disproportionate to that hope, it may be withheld or withdrawn, and the illness allowed to take its course. Death is then not chosen but accepted from the hand of God. Such decisions should be made prayerfully, with physicians, with the family, and whenever possible with one’s priest.
Care that never ceases. A treatment may end; care never does. The dying are to be kept clean and comfortable, their lips moistened, their hands held. They are to be read the Scriptures and the prayers they love, and given every opportunity for Confession, Holy Unction, and Holy Communion. The Church provides her own service at the parting of the soul from the body, so that no one need depart this life alone. Hospice and palliative care, faithfully practiced, are works of mercy of this very kind, and we commend them to you.
Preparing for our own death. We encourage every adult, while in health, to prepare an advance directive and to name a trusted person to speak for him should he become unable. This is an act of love toward one’s family and a fulfillment of the ancient counsel to remember one’s death. The directive of the ever-memorable Archimandrite Roman (Braga), appended to this letter, shows how an Orthodox Christian may do so.
V. To Those Who Suffer, and to Those Who Love Them
To you who are sick and approaching death: you are not a burden to the Body of Christ. “Whether one member suffer, all the members suffer with it” (1 Cor 12:26). When others care for you, you are not taking from them; you are giving them Christ to serve, for He said, “I was sick, and ye visited me” (Mt 25:36). Do not be afraid to ask for relief from pain, and do not be ashamed to tell your physician and your priest what you fear. Ask for the Holy Mysteries often. Your prayers from the sickbed are heard, and your patience is precious to God.
To you who care for them: “Bear ye one another’s burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ” (Gal 6:2). Look to the Mother of God, who stood by the Cross of her Son (Jn 19:25). She could not take away His suffering, but she did not leave Him. Stay near your sick. Weep with them, pray with them, and call the priest early rather than late. If someone you love asks for an assisted death, do not abandon them. Tell them the truth with tenderness, seek out every help for their pain and fear, and bring them to their pastor.
To you who mourn: allow yourselves to grieve, as Christ Himself wept. Death is a separation: of the soul from the body, and of our loved ones from our company. But it is not a separation from the love of God. If you have lost someone through an assisted death, the Church grieves with you. Commend your beloved to the boundless mercy of God, who alone knows the heart, and continue to pray for them. Bring your sorrow, and any burden of conscience, to your spiritual father. You have not been forgotten by the Church.
VI. Pastoral Directives
For all the faithful
VII. Our Witness
We ask those who govern us to ensure that no one who is elderly, disabled, or dying is ever led to believe that death is expected of him; that palliative care and support for family caregivers are available to all, “regardless of … social status, or financial condition,” as this Synod affirmed in 1992; and that clinicians who decline to take part in causing death are protected in law and in practice.
Our most eloquent witness, however, will be not our words but our works. We call upon our parishes, monasteries, and institutions to strengthen their ministries to the sick and the dying: visiting the homebound, supporting and relieving those who care for them, training clergy and laity in the care of the dying, and, where the Lord provides the means, offering Orthodox houses of care for those at the end of life.
Conclusion
Our earthly sojourn is given to us to prepare for the moment of our death, which is our passage into eternal life. But there are not two kinds of life, an earthly one and a heavenly one. There is only one life, the life of Christ, given to us not only in the age to come but already here below, even in the midst of great difficulties. It is this life that we wish for every one of you, to the very last breath.
Let us therefore care for one another to the end. Let us relieve every pain we can relieve, and sit beside every pain we cannot. Let us prepare ourselves, in the days of our health, for the hour of our departure. And let us continue to ask of the Lord, with all His Church, “a Christian ending to our life, painless, blameless, and peaceful, and a good defense before the dread judgment seat of Christ.”
“For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom 8:38–39).
Appendix: The Advance Directive of Archimandrite Roman (Braga) (1922–2015)
I am an Orthodox Christian and an Orthodox priest. I make this statement of my wishes a part of my Durable Power of Attorney for Health Care. If I am not competent to make my own health care decisions, I state that I want all decisions about my medical care to be made in accordance with this document and my Durable Power of Attorney for Health Care.
Orthodox Christians believe that in death life is transformed by the power of Christ’s death and resurrection into eternal life. Because of this belief, it is not always necessary to use every possible means to resist death. I ask that if I become terminally ill that I be fully informed of this fact so that I can prepare myself spiritually and emotionally for my eternal destiny with God.
If I am not competent to make my own health care decisions, I direct that the following be done for me. I direct that my advocate (and any agent, surrogate or health care provider) carry out my wishes expressed here and that I be cared for in accordance with Holy Tradition and the teachings and values of the Orthodox Christian faith.
If I am dying or in an irreversible coma or persistent vegetative state and there is no hope for recovery, I direct that no death delaying treatment be started or continued for the sole purpose of prolonging my life. I direct that I be given medications and treatments to relieve pain even if this results in shortening my life, but not for the purpose of ending my life.
I ask that I be cared for by my Christian community, family, friends and health care providers in a dignified and compassionate manner. Please keep my mouth and lips moist, please touch and comfort me and please read my favorite prayers and passages from the Bible to me. Please ensure that I am given the opportunity to receive the Sacraments. I ask my Christian community, friends, and family to join me in prayer as I prepare for death and that they continue to pray for me after my death. Please care for me in accordance with Holy Tradition and the teachings and values of the Orthodox Christian faith.
I direct that after my death my body be handled in accordance with Holy Tradition and the teachings and values of the Orthodox Church. If I have donated any of my organs or if there is an autopsy performed on my body, it should be done in a manner that will best prepare my body for an Orthodox Christian funeral and burial. I ask that I be buried in accordance with Holy Tradition and the teachings and values of the Orthodox Church.
A Pastoral Letter of the Holy Synod of Bishops of the Orthodox Church in America on Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia
To the Venerable Clergy, Monastics, and Faithful of the Orthodox Church in America:
Beloved children in the Lord,
At every Divine Liturgy we ask the Lord for “a Christian ending to our life, painless, blameless, and peaceful, and a good defense before the dread judgment seat of Christ.” We have prayed these words more times than we can count. We ask you now to hear them again, because the world around us has begun to offer a very different kind of ending.
In Canada, where many of our parishes live and serve, and in a growing number of American states, the law now permits physicians to prescribe, and in some places to administer, lethal drugs to the sick at their request. Whether it is called “medical assistance in dying,” “death with dignity,” physician-assisted suicide, or euthanasia, it is increasingly presented to the sick and their families as an act of mercy. Many of you have asked us for guidance: clinicians who face these questions in their daily work, and families who have faced them at the bedside of someone they love.
We write to you first as pastors. Each of us has stood beside hospital beds and open graves. We have buried the elderly after long illness, and children whose lives had scarcely begun. We have stood with families whose grief seemed too heavy for any heart to carry. We do not speak of suffering from a distance. But we have also seen, again and again, that the hour of death can be filled with prayer, with reconciliation, and even with joy, and that no one who suffers need suffer alone.
What we offer here is not a new teaching. It is what the Church has received from her Lord, and what this Holy Synod affirmed in 1992: that every human person, “young and old, sick and healthy, rich and poor, powerful and weak,” is “eternally precious in God’s sight.”
I. Our Life Is Not Our Own
Our life is not something we possess but something we continually receive from God, who breathed into us the breath of life (Gen 2:7). “For none of us liveth to himself, and no man dieth to himself. For whether we live, we live unto the Lord; and whether we die, we die unto the Lord: whether we live therefore, or die, we are the Lord’s” (Rom 14:7–8).
The dignity of a human person does not rest on strength, independence, or usefulness. It rests on the image of God, which is no less present in one who lies dying than in one who is in the fullness of health. This matters greatly today, for many who ask for an assisted death do so less because of pain than because they fear losing their independence, becoming a burden, or no longer being able to do the things that gave their lives meaning. These fears are real, and we do not dismiss them. But the Gospel answers them: a person’s worth is not measured by what he can still do.
One of us remembers visiting a young girl whose illness was slowly taking from her the music she loved, until she could no longer sing or play. She was not bitter. Shortly before her death she wrote of the snow falling outside her window, and of how beautiful it was. Her joy did not come from her suffering, and it did not make her suffering good. It came from God, who was with her in it, and it taught everyone who knew her what a human life is worth.
II. God Does Not Will Our Suffering
“For God made not death: neither hath he pleasure in the destruction of the living” (Wis 1:13). The Church does not teach that suffering is good in itself, nor that God sends illness as a punishment. When the friends of Job insisted that his afflictions must be the penalty for some hidden sin, it was they whom God rebuked (Job 42:7). When the Lord walked among us, He healed every sickness and every disease, and at the tomb of His friend Lazarus, “Jesus wept” (Jn 11:35). God does not will the suffering of men. To relieve pain is therefore to share in Christ’s own work, and to ask for such relief is no failure of faith.
Yet there are sufferings that cannot be taken away, and it is precisely there that Christ meets us. He did not remain outside our pain; He took it upon Himself, even to the Cross, so that it might become a place where God is found. The Apostle Paul, who three times asked to be delivered from his affliction, heard the Lord answer: “My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness” (2 Cor 12:9). Whatever good comes to us in suffering comes not from the suffering itself but from the grace of God, received in patience and prayer.
Nor is it faithless to grow weary of life. The Prophet Elijah lay down under a juniper tree and said, “It is enough; now, O Lord, take away my life” (1 Kings 19:4). God did not rebuke him. He sent His angel with bread and water, saying, “Arise and eat; because the journey is too great for thee” (1 Kings 19:7). Job cursed the day of his birth, yet refused the counsel to “curse God, and die” (Job 2:9–10). The longing for death, the fear of pain, and the dread of dependence are to be brought honestly to God in prayer and shared with one’s priest and physicians, not acted upon. God answers them, as He answered Elijah, with nourishment and with His presence, very often through the hands of His people.
III. What the Church Cannot Bless
In physician-assisted suicide, a clinician provides lethal drugs so that a patient may end his own life. In euthanasia, a clinician administers them for the purpose of causing death. The term “medical assistance in dying” is used in civil law for one or both. The Church looks not to the name given to an act but to what the act is. In each case, death itself is deliberately brought about as the remedy for suffering.
The commandment of God is plain: “Thou shalt not kill” (Ex 20:13). “I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life” (Deut 30:19). The deliberate taking of one’s own life, and the taking of another’s life at his request, are contrary to the Gospel of Christ, who came “that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly” (Jn 10:10). With our brother bishops of the Assembly of Canonical Orthodox Bishops of the United States of America, we affirm that the Church “cannot and does not condone any form of euthanasia.” Assisted suicide, by whatever name it is known, cannot be blessed by the Church in any way.
We speak here of acts, not of the hearts of those who suffer. Many who ask for death do so in pain, in fear, in exhaustion, or in the grip of despondency, and the judgment of the heart belongs to God alone. But the Church must speak the truth in love (Eph 4:15), for to call death a healing would be to abandon the sick at the very moment they most need the hope of Christ.
IV. What the Church Blesses
“Honour a physician … for the Lord hath created him” (Sir 38:1). The care of the sick has always been the Church’s own work, from St. Basil’s house for the sick at Caesarea to St. Herman nursing the dying of Kodiak.
The relief of pain. Because we pray for a painless end, the Church blesses the careful use of medicines to relieve pain, breathlessness, anxiety, and every other distress of the dying, given in proportion to the patient’s need. The purpose of such care is to relieve the sufferer, not to end his life, and that purpose makes it entirely different from euthanasia, even at the very end.
The limits of treatment. In 1992 this Holy Synod called the faithful to find “the ‘royal path’ between providing all necessary healing measures and merely prolonging the biological functioning of organs.” When a treatment no longer offers reasonable hope of benefit, or its burdens have become disproportionate to that hope, it may be withheld or withdrawn, and the illness allowed to take its course. Death is then not chosen but accepted from the hand of God. Such decisions should be made prayerfully, with physicians, with the family, and whenever possible with one’s priest.
Care that never ceases. A treatment may end; care never does. The dying are to be kept clean and comfortable, their lips moistened, their hands held. They are to be read the Scriptures and the prayers they love, and given every opportunity for Confession, Holy Unction, and Holy Communion. The Church provides her own service at the parting of the soul from the body, so that no one need depart this life alone. Hospice and palliative care, faithfully practiced, are works of mercy of this very kind, and we commend them to you.
Preparing for our own death. We encourage every adult, while in health, to prepare an advance directive and to name a trusted person to speak for him should he become unable. This is an act of love toward one’s family and a fulfillment of the ancient counsel to remember one’s death. The directive of the ever-memorable Archimandrite Roman (Braga), appended to this letter, shows how an Orthodox Christian may do so.
V. To Those Who Suffer, and to Those Who Love Them
To you who are sick and approaching death: you are not a burden to the Body of Christ. “Whether one member suffer, all the members suffer with it” (1 Cor 12:26). When others care for you, you are not taking from them; you are giving them Christ to serve, for He said, “I was sick, and ye visited me” (Mt 25:36). Do not be afraid to ask for relief from pain, and do not be ashamed to tell your physician and your priest what you fear. Ask for the Holy Mysteries often. Your prayers from the sickbed are heard, and your patience is precious to God.
To you who care for them: “Bear ye one another’s burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ” (Gal 6:2). Look to the Mother of God, who stood by the Cross of her Son (Jn 19:25). She could not take away His suffering, but she did not leave Him. Stay near your sick. Weep with them, pray with them, and call the priest early rather than late. If someone you love asks for an assisted death, do not abandon them. Tell them the truth with tenderness, seek out every help for their pain and fear, and bring them to their pastor.
To you who mourn: allow yourselves to grieve, as Christ Himself wept. Death is a separation: of the soul from the body, and of our loved ones from our company. But it is not a separation from the love of God. If you have lost someone through an assisted death, the Church grieves with you. Commend your beloved to the boundless mercy of God, who alone knows the heart, and continue to pray for them. Bring your sorrow, and any burden of conscience, to your spiritual father. You have not been forgotten by the Church.
VI. Pastoral Directives
For all the faithful
1. Orthodox Christians may not request, prescribe, dispense, administer, or procure the means of assisted suicide or euthanasia, nor counsel, encourage, or approve such an act. To do so is a grave sin, to be brought to God in repentance and confession. Compassionate presence to a suffering person is not, in itself, approval of the act.2. All efforts to heal, to relieve pain and distress, and to comfort the sick are to be supported, including palliative and hospice care. A treatment that no longer offers reasonable benefit, or whose burdens are disproportionate, may be withheld or withdrawn after prayerful discernment.3. Where assisted death is legal, the faithful should ask hospice and palliative-care providers directly about their practice and, whenever possible, choose those who will respect their Orthodox faith.
For pastors
4. Pastors are to teach clearly the Church’s understanding of life, suffering, and death set forth in this letter, to visit the sick and the dying faithfully, and to prepare their flocks for a Christian ending through Confession, Holy Unction, and Holy Communion.For those in the healing professions
5. When one of the faithful asks about an assisted death, the pastor is to listen before he speaks, to seek out the sources of the request (pain, fear, despondency, loneliness, the sense of being a burden), and to help the person obtain medical, palliative, psychological, and social help, together with prayer and the presence of the Christian community.
6. A priest may not bless, arrange, or facilitate an assisted death. Questions concerning pastoral care are to be referred to the diocesan bishop.
7. Funeral and memorial services for those who have died by assisted suicide or euthanasia are left to the discernment of the diocesan bishop, as is the practice in cases of suicide. The bishop will weigh both the state of the departed and the needs of the bereaved, in accordance with the holy canons and the 2022 statement of the Assembly of Bishops.
8. Orthodox physicians, nurses, pharmacists, and other clinicians are not to take part in causing a patient’s death. The Church honors their vocation to heal and to accompany the sick, and she stands with them when they must refuse on grounds of conscience. Where questions arise about cooperation within institutions that practice assisted death, they should seek pastoral guidance.
VII. Our Witness
We ask those who govern us to ensure that no one who is elderly, disabled, or dying is ever led to believe that death is expected of him; that palliative care and support for family caregivers are available to all, “regardless of … social status, or financial condition,” as this Synod affirmed in 1992; and that clinicians who decline to take part in causing death are protected in law and in practice.
Our most eloquent witness, however, will be not our words but our works. We call upon our parishes, monasteries, and institutions to strengthen their ministries to the sick and the dying: visiting the homebound, supporting and relieving those who care for them, training clergy and laity in the care of the dying, and, where the Lord provides the means, offering Orthodox houses of care for those at the end of life.
Conclusion
Our earthly sojourn is given to us to prepare for the moment of our death, which is our passage into eternal life. But there are not two kinds of life, an earthly one and a heavenly one. There is only one life, the life of Christ, given to us not only in the age to come but already here below, even in the midst of great difficulties. It is this life that we wish for every one of you, to the very last breath.
Let us therefore care for one another to the end. Let us relieve every pain we can relieve, and sit beside every pain we cannot. Let us prepare ourselves, in the days of our health, for the hour of our departure. And let us continue to ask of the Lord, with all His Church, “a Christian ending to our life, painless, blameless, and peaceful, and a good defense before the dread judgment seat of Christ.”
“For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom 8:38–39).
Appendix: The Advance Directive of Archimandrite Roman (Braga) (1922–2015)
I am an Orthodox Christian and an Orthodox priest. I make this statement of my wishes a part of my Durable Power of Attorney for Health Care. If I am not competent to make my own health care decisions, I state that I want all decisions about my medical care to be made in accordance with this document and my Durable Power of Attorney for Health Care.
Orthodox Christians believe that in death life is transformed by the power of Christ’s death and resurrection into eternal life. Because of this belief, it is not always necessary to use every possible means to resist death. I ask that if I become terminally ill that I be fully informed of this fact so that I can prepare myself spiritually and emotionally for my eternal destiny with God.
If I am not competent to make my own health care decisions, I direct that the following be done for me. I direct that my advocate (and any agent, surrogate or health care provider) carry out my wishes expressed here and that I be cared for in accordance with Holy Tradition and the teachings and values of the Orthodox Christian faith.
If I am dying or in an irreversible coma or persistent vegetative state and there is no hope for recovery, I direct that no death delaying treatment be started or continued for the sole purpose of prolonging my life. I direct that I be given medications and treatments to relieve pain even if this results in shortening my life, but not for the purpose of ending my life.
I ask that I be cared for by my Christian community, family, friends and health care providers in a dignified and compassionate manner. Please keep my mouth and lips moist, please touch and comfort me and please read my favorite prayers and passages from the Bible to me. Please ensure that I am given the opportunity to receive the Sacraments. I ask my Christian community, friends, and family to join me in prayer as I prepare for death and that they continue to pray for me after my death. Please care for me in accordance with Holy Tradition and the teachings and values of the Orthodox Christian faith.
I direct that after my death my body be handled in accordance with Holy Tradition and the teachings and values of the Orthodox Church. If I have donated any of my organs or if there is an autopsy performed on my body, it should be done in a manner that will best prepare my body for an Orthodox Christian funeral and burial. I ask that I be buried in accordance with Holy Tradition and the teachings and values of the Orthodox Church.
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