Kent R. Hughes related the following story about a pastor who helped a thirty-eight-old mother of four to die.

In the late 1970s, Margie, a thirty-eight-year-old mother of four, was hooked up to a ventilator. Unlike most other patients, she was not heavily sedated. She and her husband had just been told that she had only a few days to live because of the total respiratory failure she had experienced that very morning. Young Margie took a writing pad and asked her pastor, Dr. Darryl Bodie, the bare question “How do you die?”