The new Mrs. DeVita holds a picture of her matchmaker, the old one.

There are few things more unfair, or that represent more of an inherent abuse of power and loyalty, than dying requests.

In 2007, Jackie DeVita , a 42-year-old mother terminally ill with brain cancer, removed her wedding ring and handed it to Colleen Leary, her unmarried sister, saying, “I want to know that this is the three of us,” referring to Colleen, Jackie and her husband, Richard. “Don’t ever leave my kids.”

A year later, in 2008, Jackie died, and three months after Jackie DeVita’s funeral, Colleen Leary became Mrs. Richard DeVita.

I hope it works out.  Jackie’s request, however, was a terrible thing to do, the equivalent of emotional extortion. People who are dying have great power, and while we shouldn’t be overly critical of those who exercise it, it is a power, and like any other power, subject to abuse. In fiction, a classic example occurs in Larry McMurtry’s Western novel “Lonesome Dove,” (and in the superb mini-series adaptation, a late cut from my recent list of ethical movies), an old Texas Ranger agrees to a last wish from his dying best friend, who asks that his body be transported, by his surviving companion, all the way from Montana for burial in a Texas grove.

“I guess this will teach me to be more careful about what I promise people in the future,” the old Ranger says ruefully over the new grave.

If it just worked out that Richard and Collen fell into each other’s arms, blissfully in love, after Jackie’s death, that is wonderful for all involved. But if Colleen felt any compulsion to marry her sister’s husband (who surely got his own death-bed marching orders regarding spinster sis), she needn’t have.  Just as it is wrong for the dying to try to manipulate the free will of those who will go on living, there should be no ethical obligation to keep an extorted promise to a dying loved one.

(You can read a related 2009 post, about a man who made his wife promise to bury him face down over Marilyn Monroe, here.)