A terminally ill Manhattan woman who had been locked in a legal battle with her parents over her right to die has decided to remain on life support systems at North Shore University Hospital in Manhassset.
Grace Sun Eun Lee, 28, told her court-appointed lawyer last Friday that she wanted to accede to her parents wish that she remain on a respirator and a feeding tube, said David Smith, Lee’s attorney.
Smith said Lee has an inoperable tumor growing on her brain stem and would be unable to breathe or eat on her own without the medical aids.
“I want to make peace with my parents and I want to make peace with God,” Smith said Lee told him on Friday.
He said Lee had become “contemplative” about her situation in the wake of a state appellate court ruling that reversed an earlier decision, lifting a stay it had imposed prohibiting the hospital from removing the life-support aids, Smith said. Lee had been at odds with her parents, Rev. Manho Lee and Jin-ha Lee with whom she has been living in Douglaston since she became ill.
A Long Island judge ruled two weeks ago that Lee was competent to make her own decision. After Lee’s parents’ appealed, a state appellate court on Friday upheld her right to choose life or death.
But after that decision, Smith said his client reversed her own prior choice to end her life.
“She made it absolutely clear that she and she alone is making her own medical decisions,” Smith said in a press briefing on Monday morning.
North Shore Hospital spokesman Terry Lynam said the hospital will act in accordance with whatever choice Lee makes on her medical treatment.
“We’ll comply with her wishes, whatever they might be,” Lynam said.
If she becomes unconscious, Smith said, Lee has designated her father as her proxy to make decisions on her behalf and, if he is unable to represent her, her mother also has been designated as her proxy.
Prior to Friday, Smith said, his client had given “very clear direction to me and to others that she wanted the ventilator stopped and wanted the feeding tube removed.”
But Smith said her parents were clearly exerting influence on their daughter on religious grounds.
Lee’s father is the minister of a fundamentalist Christian sect in Queens, the Korean Antioch Congregationalist Church.
“He was standing over her and telling her she was going to rot in hell” if she refused to continue receiving treatment on the life-support machines, Smith said.
Smith said Lee’s mother and two brothers are also members of the church where Lee has also been a member.
Lee was living in Manhattan, working as a financial manager at Bank of America and training to run the New York City Marathon last year when she fell ill one month before the race. Doctors at Sloan Kettering Hospital found a tumor in her brain stem. Smith said Lee was admitted to North Shore University Hospital in Manhasset after being released from Sloan Kettering.
He said social workers and doctors at the Community Drive facility had been working with the Lee family to comply with her parents desire to transfer their daughter to another facility, but have as yet been unable to find a facility that can support her in her present condition.
Smith said there is no doubt in her doctors’ assessment of her condition that the effect of the growing tumor is irreversible and will ultimately kill her.
“It’s going to be the cause of her death in short order,” Smith said.
