‘Obituary’ by Sathya Dhara Kovac

Sathya Kovac died by medical assistance in dying (MAID) on October 3, 2022, at the age of 44. In this auto-obituary, Sathya thanks her loved ones for their support and encourages them to remember her through acts like petting dogs, looking at the sky, and treating each other well. She describes how she lived with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), which had claimed the lives of her mother, uncle, and grandmother. Sathya calls for more awareness, research, and hope, so that fewer people might be lost to ALS. Her obituary includes a sharp rebuke of the societal supports that she was offered. She states that, ‘it was not a genetic disease that took me out, it was a system.’ She describes the system that offered her only inadequate care as a sickness and as the cause of her suffering. Sathya states that if she had had more help, she would have had more time.

Sathya’s obituary was published in the context of ongoing debates about how far eligibility for MAID would be extended in Canada. Her death occurred as Parliament was debating extending eligibility for MAID to people whose sole medical condition was a mental illness. As of March 2021, a person’s natural death no longer had to be reasonably foreseeable for them to be eligible for MAID because of the passing of Bill C-7. However, Parliament had excluded people whose sole medical condition was a mental illness from eligibility for MAID for two years, until March 2023. Debates ensued not only about MAID and mental illness, but also about the eligibility of mature minors, advance requests, mental illness, palliative care, and the protection of Canadians with disabilities. Throughout those debates, Sathya’s case has been used as an example of how protections for Canadians with disabilities are insufficient and have led people with disabilities to opt for MAID because of poverty and lack of supports. Since her death, Sathya’s friends have revealed that she concealed that a lack of adequate home care made her seek MAID so that her application would be approved. Further, they shared that the only avenue Sathya was offered for increased support was through institutionalization in a long-term care facility, which she refused. Those who raise Sathya’s case argue that she was offered dignity in death without being offered dignity in life. For them, deaths like Sathya’s will become more frequent as MAID is expanded unless additional safeguards are put in place that include support for people with disabilities.

* Addendum on 18 September 2026:

Printed in the Winnipeg Free Press on 8 October 2022 – then republished online – Sathya Dhara Kovac’s self-written obituary is remarkable in form and content. While standard death notices run 40-100 words and paid obituaries average 300, Kovac’s spans 550, with a total of 10 paragraphs plus a 3-line poetic envoi. She opens with an acknowledgement of the unorthodox length (‘I will keep this long’), which is also a play on the idea of limits – both because she sees death as part of a journey and because she leaves us a to-do wish list, thus setting up her obituary to outlive its mere text. Kovac’s last wishes take the form of two dozen imperatives about treating all – other humans, animals, ourselves – with respect, connecting the valorization of care with a call to fight structural inequality and ‘smash the patriarchy HARD’. Kovac’s imperatives may be grouped into different kinds of requests to ‘do something…’: for others (e.g., ‘feed someone hungry’); for yourself (‘do your healing work’); for Kovac (‘send me reminders to release and detach’); and for systemic reform (‘Look to unhealthy societal structures and government. There is desperate need for change’). This last imperative concludes Kovac’s discussion of living with ALS. After lamenting the insufficient ‘awareness, research and hope’ regarding ALS and urging ‘someone… to cure this thing’, Kovac emphasizes how the lack of support factored in her decision to access MAiD: ‘There are not enough supports and services promoting quality of life and independence for those who are not healthy and able-bodied’. Kovac’s sentences reverberated with interest groups and legislators alike, who cited them in the debate about ‘Track 2’ MAiD in Canada: to someone whose death is not reasonably foreseeable, is it ethical to offer assisted dying instead of support to improve their living conditions? (See related entry about the 2022 video statement by ‘Sophia’, which raised similar questions.) The gratitude and pragmatic advice that permeate Kovac’s obituary make her sharp criticism hard to dismiss: if her other requests are so actionable, her plea for more support for people with ALS should be too. The fact that Kovac’s obituary is self-written also makes it particularly poignant and comparable to a goodbye letter (see related entry on Antonio Cicero’s letter). In an essay about the development of obituary writing, Stuti Beri notes that the genre was first established in the 17th century, but it was only in the 21st, with ‘an uprising in form of mass mourning on social media’, that ‘people started publishing their self-written obituaries’. While history records earlier self-epitaphs such as Benjamin Franklin’s (1728) or mock obituaries such as P.T. Barnum’s (1891), the subversive power of Kovac’s is not irony but candour: ‘I feel sorry for you guys because after all this time thinking I’m annoying you’re now going to really miss me… I’m not afraid to make this weird’.