Uli Seit for The New York Times
The Rev. Man Ho Lee and Jin Ah Lee at Antioch Missionary Church in Flushing, Queens. Their daughter, SungEun Grace Lee, is terminally ill.
It was the pastor's birthday at Antioch Missionary Church in Flushing, Queens, and members of the church, mostly Korean, were preparing a special Sunday lunch for him.
They settled the usual helpings of kimchi, squid and rice into bowls, hung balloons from the ceiling and lighted the candles on a tall vanilla frosted cake. When morning services ended and the congregation gathered in the basement cafeteria to eat, they sang him a Korean "Happy Birthday," snapping photos as he blew out the candles.
But for the pastor, the Rev. Man Ho Lee, the party on Sunday was an unwelcome distraction from the mission he has had for the past several weeks: to keep his terminally ill daughter alive.
His daughter, SungEun Grace Lee, 28, has brain cancer; she is paralyzed from the neck down but is conscious. She communicates by blinking and mouthing words, and through those signals, she has conveyed divergent messages about her will to die.
"Pastor Lee's very upset," said King Lee, 67, a family friend, as the congregation sang hymns in the cafeteria. "He says, 'One of my family is sick, but we're having a party.' "
"Inside, suffering," Mr. Lee added, pressing a hand to his heart, "but he's a pastor. He cannot make a suffering face."
Ms. Lee worked as a bank financial manager before she felt ill one day more than a year ago and was found to have brain cancer. After having seizures at home in Queens in early September, she was taken to North Shore University Hospital in Manhasset on Long Island.
She has been there ever since, becoming the center of a legal battle between her parents, who say God should determine when she dies, and her doctors, who insist she has told them she wants to die.
Her parents argue that she made her initial decision when she was depressed and under the influence of heavy medication, and that the hospital has not tried to cure her, only to ease her dying. On Saturday, after an appellate court panel ruled that she was capable of making her own decisions about her care, her lawyer said, she told him she wanted to live.
The family wants to move her to a nursing home, but the hospital told them the transfer would be impossible because they cannot move the ventilator she is connected to, said Jay Kim, a family friend and spokesman.
Ms. Lee's family says she has wanted to live all along. Born in Korea but educated in the United States, she has spent years teaching Sunday school at her father's church and traveling on mission trips to Africa. Her parents add that she, too, believes in allowing God to determine her fate.
"She tells us that she feels good," said Paul Lee, one of her two brothers, proudly listing signs of Ms. Lee's progress. This weekend, he said, she began eating solid food, asked for her hospital bed to be repositioned so that she could see outside her window, asked to go outside in a wheelchair and requested that the hospital provide a more sophisticated communication system. "She's really excited," he said.
Her parents were in the room with Paul Lee, whom they had designated to speak for them; they speak only Korean.
In one of their many complaints about the hospital, her parents say she has been given more than a dozen doses of medication every day to alleviate her pain and help her sleep, but not to treat her tumor; they say the medications impede her judgment without helping her get better. With fewer medications, she is more hopeful, they said.
Her family has assembled an army of supporters, asking thousands of Korean churchgoers in New York and New Jersey to pray for their daughter every Sunday. Meanwhile, in a small basement room at the church, a team of the church's young members has been working for several days on a campaign urging the authorities to keep her alive, creating Facebook and Tumblr pages and collecting petition signatures. In their first week, they gathered more than 4,000 signatures, Mr. Kim said, and they are ready to take their cause to Washington if need be.
"The hospital and the court is making a mistake only because they don't know who Grace really is," church members wrote in a letter to other Korean churches. "She is the most hopeful, positive and persistent person there is and encourages others to do the same."
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