An Open Letter to Actress Claire Brosseau: Please, Please Stay

New York (VINNEWS/Rabbi Yair Hoffman)  Dear Claire,

You do not know me, and I do not pretend to know the depth of the darkness inside the room where you have been living. But your face has been on the front pages of newspapers today, and your words have been read with tears of human beings across the world. And I desperately hope, that you will read this before the court rules.

Please. Please stay.

There is no attempt here to argue that you are not suffering. The suffering is real. You have taken twenty-four different medications, multiple therapies, ECT – just to relieve that suffering.  At eight, you wrote in your Hello Kitty diary that you wished you were dead. You sat on train tracks thinking that the world would be lighter without you. It won’t – it will be far darker. 

You have a wound that has been bleeding for forty-one years, and anyone who tells you otherwise has not listened.

But listen, Claire. Just for the length of this letter, listen.

There is a verse in the Book of Deuteronomy, where Moses, standing on the edge of the Jordan, with all of Israel before him, says something that has echoed for three thousand years: “U’vacharta ba’chayim” — “And you shall choose life, so that you may live, you and your offspring” (Devarim 30:19).

Notice the wording. Not “life will be easy.” Not “life will feel worth living.” The Torah commands choosing life specifically because life sometimes does not feel so choosable. The words only makes sense in the dark because in the light, no command is needed.

You have been in the narrow place for so long that the narrow place feels like the whole world. It is not. The mind, in severe depression, is a liar. It is a brilliant, sophisticated, articulate liar that uses your own voice and your own intelligence against you. It tells you that the suffering is permanent, that no future treatment will work because past treatments have not, that your loved ones will eventually be relieved, that the universe will close neatly behind you. Every one of those sentences is false, and the part of your brain that is ill or has been affected by some bad chemistry is the part generating them.

Your own psychiatrist, Dr. Fefergrad, said it plainly: “I believe she can get well.” He has nothing to gain by lying. He believes it. Hold onto his belief on the days you cannot find your own.

Now, the harder part of this letter.

Claire, you said in court that you want to die alone in a hospital so that your loved ones will not have to watch. That sentence reveals the most beautiful thing about you, which is that even now, in agony, you are thinking of others. So please think of others a little longer.

Your sister Melissa said she was furious, that she saw it as giving up. Hear her. Not because anger is the right response — she would tell you herself that underneath the fury is terror — but because she is telling you what your absence will do.

Your mother said no mother wants to see incredible suffering, and no mother wants to lose a child before her. She is being torn in half on a public stage, in the New York Times, because she loves you so much that she cannot bring herself to say no out loud, and she cannot bring herself to say yes either. That is not a peaceful death you would be leaving her. That is a wound she will carry into her own grave.

And there is something larger. Something that goes beyond your family.

If a Canadian court grants the exemption, a delicate and precious line moves. It moves for the next person, and the next, and the next. It moves for the twenty-two-year-old whose depression will lift in three years if she is alive to see it. It moves for the veteran who is told, instead of treatment, that the door is open. It moves for the elderly woman in a nursing home who does not want to be a burden. T

The data from countries that have walked further down this road climbs every year, and they climb fastest among the lonely, the poor, the disabled, and the mentally ill. You are an articulate, accomplished, beloved woman with two psychiatrists and a national platform. The next person in line will have none of that, and the door you are pushing open will be the door they walk through without anyone noticing.

There is a teaching from the Jerusalem Talmud that whoever destroys a single soul, Scripture considers it as if he destroyed an entire world; and whoever sustains a single soul, Scripture considers it as if he sustained an entire world. The sages did not say a soul contains a world. They said a soul is a world. Every memory you carry, every shade of light you have noticed, every kindness you have ever extended to your Maltipoo Olive, every line you delivered in every film — that is a universe. Universes do not get rebuilt. When they end, they end.

Here is what is being asked. Not forever. Not a promise to be cured. Not a vow to be happy.

Psychiatry is in a more dynamic moment than it has ever been. The you that is reading this letter cannot imagine relief. The you of next October might be writing a letter of your own to someone else in the narrow place, telling her what you wish someone had told you.

And if not — if a year from now nothing has changed — this conversation can be had again, in a year. Death is the one decision that allows no revision. Everything else can wait.

There is a story told about the Kotzker Rebbe, who was asked why G-d created human beings if He knew they would suffer. The Kotzker answered: G-d did not create us to be happy. He created us to be real. To be a witness. To choose, in the dark, to be a presence in the world. Claire, your presence is itself a kind of witness. The fact that you have stayed alive for forty-nine years, with the mind you have been given, is not a failure. It is one of the bravest things a person can do, and you have done it every single morning, including this morning.

Olive is waiting at the foot of the bed. Your mother is praying tonight in a language perhaps neither of you would call prayer. Your sister, the one who loves you so much it comes out as anger, is checking her phone. Dr. Fefergrad still believes you can get well. There are strangers, this writer among them, who do not know your face from any film but who know your name now, and who are asking, from across borders and faiths and languages, the same simple thing.

Please stay with us.

U’vacharta ba’chayim. Choose life. Even when life has not earned the choosing. Especially then.

Rabbi Yair Hoffman   

[email protected]