By Mar-Vic Cagurangan
Variety News Staff

A UNIVERSITY of Guam professor yesterday endorsed the passage of a bill that would allow a family to mourn the death of a terminally-ill family member “with dignity” and in privacy without government intrusion.
“Dignity at death is assisted by those remaining. Many of our rituals are as much for the living as they are for those who have passed,” Dr. Aline Yamashita stated in her testimony before the committee on health, human services and homeland security chaired by Sen. Frank Blas Jr., R-Yona.
The committee yesterday held a public hearing on Sen. Jesse A. Lujan’s Bill 6, titled the “Stanley Edward Palacios Cruz Family Compassion Act.”
Under the present law, any death that occurred at home is considered a homicide. Police officers thus come to the residence to investigate a possible foul play.
Lujan introduced Bill 6 following the death of Stanley Edward Palacios Cruz, a 14-year-old boy who succumbed to cancer late last year. In anticipation of the boy’s death, his physician sent him home so he could enjoy his last days with his family. The mandatory police investigation ensured after his death.
The Cruz family and medical authorities considered the investigation procedure “unnecessarily intrusive.”
“The requirements made it difficult to be civil during incredibly distraught times. Truly, only those of us who have had someone close to us die know what this is really like,” Yamashita said.
“One can only imagine what it is like to have your son die at home and be subjected to interrogation, no matter how skillful and sensitive the officers are,” she added.
Yamashita narrated her own personal experience with the bureaucratic procedure amid grief, while trying to help her cousins whose mother had passed away.
“I can see the ambulance driver and the police officer asking the mandatory questions. I was struck by the law enforcement requirements—the red tape—that had to be addressed then and there before Auntie Rose was taken away,” she recalled.
Lujan’s bill seeks to afford families protection from “unwarranted governmental intrusion,” when anticipated death occurs at a place and under conditions permitted by law.  It supports a patient’s decision to leave the hospital or other institutional setting “upon certification of anticipated death by the patient’s attending physician.”