An elderly Calgary woman who got a tattoo against euthanasia is the subject of a new short film..The four-minute film was put together by Amanda Achtman and posted on her channel October 2. It was promoted in an email the same day by Canadian Physicians for Life..Christine Nagel was born in London, England in 1935 and lost her mother to ALS when she was ten years old. She came to Canada in 1957 to teach at a country school in Saskatchewan. She married a local farmer, stayed with him for 36 years, and adopted seven children. However, her husband developed schizophrenia, and she recalled the final ten years of her marriage as “a reign of terror.”.“I was scared stiff of him most of the time. Everything was piling in on me. And I couldn't see any way out of it. I just reached the end of my tether,” she recalled..“I had some pills that the doctor had given me. I was very much on edge, and I just decided I'm gonna swallow this and I'm gonna get to sleep, and that's the end of it. It was so wrong. But I hadn't really thought about it one way or the other till after I did it.”.Nagel changed her mind soon enough to save her life..“Right after I swallowed everything, then I was concerned about the kids and began to realize how wrong it was. And so I got help. The kids I adopted were just so precious and so important.”.The experience made a permanent impact on her life. She said suffering is part of life and she wants a natural death no matter what. After the federal government passed a euthanasia bill, Nagel was “so disgusted” she decided to declare her convictions against it..In the Second World War era, British Catholics carried a card that said, “I am a Catholic. In case of accident, please call a priest.” Nagel decided to do one better..“I decided I'd get a tattoo that would be with me forever,” she said..She did just that at the age of 81. She said responses have been positive, including times she has been in medical care..“When I went to the hospitals, the nurses would see it…They'd say good for you, you know, and doctors walking by would give me a thumbs up because none of them wanted to be involved in helping live people to kill themselves. It just went against the whole idea of being a doctor.”.Achtman asked Nagel how she could see the value of life so clearly despite her suffering..“Because I know I'm here for a reason. Because God wanted me to be. You want to be born into this family and eventually raise his children, do whatever I can to follow his way and to be with him. And the older I get, the closer I am to God. Respect the life you have. It's a gift from God.”.Nagel’s story was first shared in August on Achtman’s Substack Dying to Meet You. The post includes details not included in the film, such as how the “old-fashioned” Nagel discouraged her own children from getting tattoos. When she told them she was getting one and what it would say they asked why..“Because the government passed a bill that is a way to eradicate human life, but human life is a gift from God. We don’t decide when it begins; no more do we decide when it ends,” Nagel told them..Nagel also shared reflections on how people approached life in the war years compared to now..“There was so much suffering and death that people would hardly think of cutting life short intentionally. But now, the Western world has become more and more affluent and suffering is not so apparent. People feel entitled to have a life based on F-U-N. It’s got to be fun or else it’s not worth it,” she explained..“We always ask the children, ‘Did you have fun?’ And adults tell each other, ‘Oh, that was such fun!’ Fun has become the goal of life. But life isn’t always fun; life has suffering. Life is a pit stop on the way to heaven.”
