There’s life in Grace yet.
The terminally ill Queens woman who last week won a pitched legal battle against her parents giving her the right to die has decided to stay on her respirator after all, her lawyer told The Post.
“She told me that she’s not going to exercise her right to remove the ventilator, and she expects that is not going to change,” said attorney David Smith.
Grace Sung Eun Lee, once a promising manager at Bank of America but now crippled by an inoperable brain tumor, has been told by her doctors that she has just weeks to live.
Lee, 28, had previously insisted she “wants to die” — pleading with her doctors to unhook her from the respirator that keeps her alive in North Shore University Hospital.
But yesterday, the tragic daughter decided to choose life.
“I asked her, ‘Are you doing this to make peace with your parents?’ and her clear-as-a-bell answer was: ‘I am doing this to make peace with God,’ ” Smith said, adding that her parents, Jin Ah Lee and Rev. Man Ho Lee were relieved.
Despite their daughter’s initial death wish, her religious Korean-immigrant parents would have none of it.
Last week, they filed a court order that would prevent their daughter from ending her life, claiming that cutting off her oxygen supply would be “Satan’s work.”
Her parents lost when an appellate panel of judges decided not to uphold the temporary restraining order Lee’s parents had won that would stop any life-sustaining machinery from being unplugged.
To learn her latest wish, her lawyer read her lips.
Grace communicates with her family and her lawyer by mouthing words because she cannot speak.
“She speaks clearly and carefully by moving her lips,” Smith said. “You repeat back to her what you think she said, and she mouths yes or no. She has no hesitation in her communication.”
The case is due back in court on Tuesday, to deal with Grace’s guardianship proceeding. She is expected to appoint her parents as her health-care proxies, her attorney said. Her attorney said it was still important to Grace to win the right to choose for herself.
“You’re paralyzed, and what do you have left but the expression of your own free will?” Smith said.
“That’s what ended up being paramount for Grace. She has decided to make peace with her parents, but it was her making the decision.”