On May 17, 2025, Nicholas Tomaino, now an editor at The Washington Post, photographed his friend Dovie Eisner holding a copy of the New York Post with his byline.
It was a proud moment for Eisner, a profoundly disabled New Yorker who’d penned a heartfelt piece in opposition to a proposed state assisted-suicide bill, which has since become law.
Eisner wrote, “I was born with a recessive genetic neuromuscular condition called nemaline myopathy. I use a portable ventilator to breathe and a motorized wheelchair to get around . . . I’m not terminal — but many times, my own body can feel like a straitjacket. God willing, I’ve got another couple of decades left.”
The next day, due to a malfunction with his ventilator, Eisner was rendered unconscious and left in a vegetative state. Last week, he passed away at just 35 years old.
Last month, New York’s Medical Aid in Dying law — the law he warned against — took effect.
Despite his quiet, unassuming life in Brooklyn in an ultra-Orthodox Jewish family, Eisner somehow befriended some of the most influential minds in the conservative political world through his intellect, perseverance and sheer will.
Since his death, prominent intellectuals like Princeton University Prof. Robert George and The Washington Post’s Ramesh Ponnuru have offered reflections, alongside obituaries in UnHerd, Fox News and National Review.
For a man whose physical world could be severely constrained, Eisner built a remarkably expansive intellectual and social one.
His life was a living rebuttal of those pushing assisted-suicide laws.
It was testimony to the fact that disabled lives have value, and that lives filled with pain and limitation can still be very much worth living.
That message becomes more profound as the boundaries around assisted death continue to expand elsewhere.
The same week Eisner passed away, reports emerged that the first toddler in the Netherlands had been euthanized since the country expanded its euthanasia rules to allow children ages 1 to 12 to be eligible under certain circumstances.
Last year in Spain, Noelia Castillo, a 25-year-old woman, won the “right” to die after a long court battle with her parents.Castillo had made multiple suicide attempts, having struggled with psychiatric illness and reported that she’d been sexually assaulted. Society should’ve provided her with protection, psychiatric treatment and support. Instead, the story became about her fight for permission to die.
In Canada, the story’s even more staggering. As Rupa Subramanya reported last year, “One out of every 20 deaths in Canada is triggered by the government-run assisted suicide program.”
In Ontario alone, 219 people in 2023 received medical assistance in dying by the end of the day after they requested it, with about 30% of those deaths occurring the very same day.
Research indicates that suicide attempts are usually regretted by people who survive them, an important detail given how rushed many are.
In light of his suffering and dependence, Eisner lived on the wrong side of the line assisted-suicide backers draw when it comes to whose lives have value.
He couldn’t breathe without mechanical help; he couldn’t get around without a motorized wheelchair.His body, as he put it himself, could feel like a “straitjacket.”And yet he wanted more time.
That is what makes his testimony so powerful: Eisner chose life enthusiastically every time he left his house.
The night before his coma, he recorded a video explaining how someone unfamiliar with his ventilator could reattach and repair it in an emergency. His friends would soon realize just how prescient that instinct had been.
Those who spent time with him also remembered something that now feels profound: how deeply he appreciated life’s simplest pleasures.
His Instagram feed is filled with flowers and cats, outings with friends and encounters with famous faces like Kelsey Grammer and his friend Rick Santorum.
This was not a man waiting around to die. He was too busy living.
In his Post column, Eisner warned, “The logic of assisted suicide leads inevitably to the conclusion that those with doctor-approved expiration dates are living lives not worth living.”
New York lawmakers rejected his warning.But Eisner left behind something more powerful than an argument: the evidence of his own 35 years.
Dovie Eisner feared a society increasingly willing to tell people in bodies like his that death could be an act of dignity.His own life offered the answer: Dignity is never in the dying; it’s in insisting on living, fully and enthusiastically.
Bethany Mandel writes and podcasts at The Mom Wars and is a homeschooling mother of six in greater Washington, DC.
