“I Don’t Want to Be a Burden.” But What If That’s the Point?

There is a phrase I hear all the time whenever euthanasia, assisted suicide, aging, or serious illness comes up:

“I would never want to be a burden.”

And I understand why people say it. I really do.

Nobody wants to imagine themselves unable to walk to the bathroom alone. Nobody wants their adult child helping them get dressed, their spouse keeping track of medications, someone changing their sheets or cutting up their food. We spend most of our lives learning how to be independent, and the possibility of losing that independence can feel humiliating.

But somewhere along the way, I think we started treating being a burden as though it were automatically an evil.

And I’m not sure that’s true.

In fact, from a Catholic perspective, sometimes a burden can actually be a good thing.

Not necessarily pleasant. Not something we go looking for. And certainly not something we deliberately dump onto other people when we are perfectly capable of carrying it ourselves.

But good in the sense that God can permit burdens in our lives for a purpose.

Because burdens change us.

Think about almost anything in life that has actually required you to become less selfish.

Children are burdens.

Again, that sounds awful written down, but it’s objectively true. They require enormous amounts of time, money, energy and sacrifice. Babies wake us up at night. Toddlers interrupt everything. Teenagers have needs at the least convenient possible moment. Parenting requires giving up things you wanted to do because somebody else needs you more.

And we don’t normally conclude from that that children are therefore bad.

Quite the opposite.

We recognize that loving another human being enough to rearrange our lives around his or her needs can make us better people.

It can teach patience where we had none.

It can expose selfishness we didn’t even realize was there.

It can teach us that our time isn’t entirely our own.

It can teach perseverance, tenderness, responsibility, mercy and sacrifice.

Why, then, have we decided that burdens become inherently bad when the person creating them is elderly, sick or disabled?

Maybe Grandma needing someone to take her to the doctor isn’t simply an unfortunate inconvenience that ought to be eliminated.

Maybe the inconvenience itself is doing something.

Maybe God is using it.

Maybe the adult son who would rather spend Saturday doing something else needs to learn that love sometimes means giving up Saturday.

Maybe the daughter caring for an aging mother is learning a kind of patience she could never have learned from a book.

Maybe the husband caring for his sick wife is being asked to live out, in an extraordinarily concrete way, what he once promised when he said, in sickness and in health.

Maybe the person who has always been fiercely independent is now being asked to learn humility by allowing someone else to wash her hair.

We don’t know everything God is doing through the burdens He permits.

And that’s an important distinction: God permitting something does not mean the thing itself is good.

Disease isn’t good.

Dementia isn’t good.

Disability isn’t a punishment sent by God to teach everybody else a lesson.

Death itself entered the world through sin.

But God is so sovereign that He can bring good even out of things that are not good in themselves.

And sometimes the good He brings out of them is what happens to the people who are called upon to carry the burden.

This is one of the things that troubles me so deeply about the phrase “I don’t want to be a burden” when it is used to justify euthanasia.

Because who told us that having to carry one another is something from which human beings ought to be protected?

Christianity certainly didn’t.

Christianity tells us:

“Bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ.” (Galatians 6:2)

That verse doesn’t say, Make absolutely certain you never have a burden for anyone else to bear.

It assumes there will be burdens.

And then it tells us what to do with them.

Carry them for one another.

There is something profoundly Christian about being inconvenienced by love.

We don’t like saying that anymore.

Modern life places enormous value on autonomy, convenience, efficiency and independence. We don’t want anybody interfering with our plans. We don’t want obligations we didn’t choose. We certainly don’t want someone’s needs rearranging our lives.

But sometimes those unwanted obligations are exactly where God does some of His most serious work on us.

Sometimes the thing I am calling a burden is the very thing exposing how selfish I still am.

Ouch.

I don’t particularly enjoy that thought either.

But holiness isn’t always convenient.

And love that never costs me anything isn’t much of a sacrifice.

None of this means caregivers shouldn’t need help. Of course they do. Caregiving can become physically, financially and emotionally overwhelming. People need respite. Families need support. Sometimes professional care becomes necessary. We should never romanticize exhaustion or suggest that asking for help means someone has failed to love enough.

In fact, maybe that’s another place where the burden spreads outward and calls more people into love.

Perhaps one person was never supposed to carry it alone.

Family.

Friends.

Neighbors.

Parish.

Doctors.

Nurses.

Hospice.

The Christian answer to “This person has become too much for one person to carry” should be:

“Then more of us need to help carry them.”

Not:

“Then perhaps that person should die.”

Because once death becomes an acceptable solution to dependency, something frightening happens.

“I don’t want to be a burden” can slowly become:

“I shouldn’t be a burden.”

And eventually:

“Maybe I am selfish for staying alive.”

Think about what that does to an elderly person.

Imagine lying in a hospital bed knowing your children are rearranging their schedules around you. They’re spending money. They’re tired. They’re missing work.

And now imagine living in a society that has told you death is an acceptable way to relieve them of you.

Is the choice to die really happening in a vacuum?

Or have we quietly created a moral pressure upon vulnerable people to justify continuing to exist?

Human dignity cannot depend upon how convenient we are.

The Church teaches that euthanasia is morally unacceptable because intentionally causing the death of an innocent human being cannot become the solution to suffering or dependency.

That doesn’t mean Catholic teaching requires us to use every imaginable medical intervention to keep a body functioning indefinitely. It doesn’t. There is an important difference between accepting the natural approach of death and deliberately causing death.

But there is an even deeper Christian principle underneath all of this.

We belong to one another.

St. Paul describes the Church as a body. When one member suffers, the others suffer with him.

That means sometimes I will carry you.

And sometimes you will carry me.

And perhaps one of the hardest things about that is that most of us would much rather be the person doing the carrying.

There can even be a strange kind of pride hidden inside generosity.

I’m the strong one.

I’m the helper.

I’m the one everybody depends upon.

Being the one who needs help requires something completely different.

Humility.

Trust.

The willingness to receive love without being able to repay it.

Maybe that’s part of the sanctification too.

The caregiver may need to learn sacrifice.

The person receiving care may need to learn humility.

One person learns how to give.

The other learns how to receive.

And God may be working on both of them at the same time.

Even Our Lord allowed Himself to be carried and cared for.

He entered the world as a helpless infant. The Blessed Virgin fed Him, dressed Him and carried Him. St. Joseph worked to provide for Him and fled with Him into Egypt to protect His life.

And at Calvary, when Christ physically could not carry His Cross any farther, Simon of Cyrene was made to carry it with Him.

I’ve always found that detail striking.

God could have arranged things differently.

Instead, another human being was permitted to help carry the burden of Christ.

Maybe that should tell us something.

We were never promised lives in which nobody would need anything from us.

Quite the opposite.

Christ repeatedly placed the hungry, the sick, the poor, the imprisoned, the widow, the orphan and the stranger directly in front of us and told us that what we do for them, we do for Him.

Those people are going to interrupt our plans.

They are going to require things.

Sometimes caring for them is going to cost us something.

That’s rather the point.

So yes, I understand the instinct behind saying, “I never want to be a burden.”

I don’t particularly want to be one either.

But maybe I shouldn’t be quite so afraid of it.

Because if someday I need someone to carry me, perhaps God will be doing something in that person’s soul through the carrying.

And perhaps He will be doing something in mine by making me humble enough to be carried.

The goal of the Christian life was never to reach the grave having inconvenienced as few people as possible.

The goal is holiness.

And sometimes God gets us there through the people we love.

Sometimes through the people who love us.

Sometimes by giving us someone to carry.

And sometimes by allowing us to become the one who needs carrying.

“Bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ.”

Maybe we should stop being quite so afraid of having burdens.

God may have put something holy inside the carrying.