PORTLAND, Ore. — Brittany Maynard will not live to see whether her advocacy makes a difference.
The 29-year-old woman expects to die no later than Nov. 1. If the brain cancer from which she suffers does not kill her in October, she plans to take advantage of Oregon’s Death with Dignity Act and end her own life on the first of November — a few days after her husband’s 30th birthday.
Maynard and her husband, Dan Diaz, uprooted from northern California and moved north because Oregon allows terminally ill patients to end their lives with lethal medications prescribed by a doctor.
Rather than silently await death in Portland, she has become an advocate for the group Compassion & Choices, which seeks to expand death-with-dignity laws beyond Oregon and a handful of other states.
A nationwide media campaign featuring Maynard’s story began Monday and has gone viral.
“I can’t even tell you the amount of relief that it provides me to know that I don’t have to die the way that it’s been described to me, that my brain tumor would take me on its own,” she says in an online video.
More than 750 people in Oregon used the law to die as of Dec. 31, 2013. The median age of the deceased is 71. Only six were younger than 34.
Maynard said she and her husband were newlyweds trying for a family when she learned on New Year’s Day that she had brain cancer. By spring, she was given six months to live.
“I hope to enjoy however many days I have on this beautiful earth and spend as much of it outside as I can surrounded by those I love,” Maynard said in the video.
