SungEun Grace Lee, who was at the center of a struggle pitting her right to die against her family's wish to keep her alive, died on Sunday, according to her family. She was 28.
Last fall, Ms. Lee's relatives posted a video of her, paralyzed from the neck down by a brainstem tumor, on YouTube. They wanted to gain public support for their battle to prevent her from being removed from life support, an act they saw as a violation of their evangelical Christian faith.
Ms. Lee lived five months longer than she would have had her family not gone to court to keep her alive, one of her brothers, Paul Lee, said.
"I think it almost feels like Grace gave us time to get ready," Mr. Lee said on Tuesday. "She was giving my parents time to do stuff with her."
In the final months of her life, Ms. Lee cuddled under her favorite blanket in her childhood bedroom and looked at pictures from the life in South Korea that she left when she was about 10.
At a court hearing in September, doctors who were treating her at North Shore University Hospital in Manhasset, N.Y., testified that Ms. Lee, a former honors student and corporate finance officer, wanted to die because she could not bear to live such a diminished life. But in the YouTube video, Ms. Lee seemed to mouth, "Yes" when asked if she wanted her father to make decisions for her.
Her parents, the Rev. Man Ho Lee and Jin Ah Lee, said she was being manipulated by the hospital staff. Ultimately, she agreed to go home and was discharged a few days before Thanksgiving to her parents' house in Douglaston, Queens. She settled into her room, her brother said, and her family covered her with the baby blanket, which had been so comforting to her that she had taken it to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she majored in business.
SungEun Grace Lee had attended a selective program in high school, the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics, her brother said. She was working for Bank of America and training for a marathon when she fell ill in October 2011.
Ms. Lee was unconscious for the last week of her life, her brother said. About 5 p.m. Sunday, he recalled, "she couldn't breathe, which doesn't really make sense because the machine was breathing for her." He said she died at a hospital about an hour later, surrounded by her parents, him and her other brother, Danny. Members of her father's church, Antioch Missionary Church in Flushing, Queens, arrived soon after to pray for her. Her funeral will be held at 8 p.m. Thursday at the church.
"Our thoughts and prayers are with her family and friends," Terry Lynam, a spokesman for North Shore, where she was on life support last fall, said on Tuesday.
Paul Lee said that after his sister came home in November, he asked her several times whether they had made a mistake by insisting that she live. "She always told us that it was the right choice," he said.
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