Ms. Lee, a University of North Carolina graduate, was a financial manager at Bank of America and training for the New York City Marathon when she fell ill with a brainstem tumor in October 2011, according to a letter that her father wrote to church members. She moved in with her parents in Douglaston, Queens, and endured chemotherapy and radiation. But in early September, she had a seizure and was admitted to North Shore, where she agreed to have a tracheotomy and to be put on a feeding tube, her court-appointed lawyer, David A. Smith, said.

Toward the end of September, fearing that Ms. Lee would be taken off life support, her father went to court in Nassau County to try to become her guardian so he could make her medical decisions. A judge temporarily restrained the hospital from removing Ms. Lee from life support. The restraining order was lifted last Friday, by Justice Thomas P. Phelan of State Supreme Court in Nassau County.

Image Ms. Lee at North Shore University Hospital. Credit... David A. Smith

In a hearing before Justice Phelan, Ms. Lee’s physician, a psychiatrist and a social worker all testified that she had clearly said that she wanted to be removed from life support. “She keeps repeating that she doesn’t care and she just wants the tube out. Why won’t I take it out, why, why, why?” Dr. Dana Lustbader, her physician and the chief of palliative care, told the court.

Dr. Lustbader said that most people on life support with a brain tumor like Ms. Lee’s have only weeks or months to live before dying of pneumonia or bedsores or infection. She said that on Sept. 18, doctors had tried to see whether Ms. Lee could survive without the breathing tube, but it appeared that she could not.

But a lawyer for the family, Mary P. Giordano, told the judge, “Your honor, the family’s belief is that people who commit suicide go to hell.” Paul Lee told the court that not only was suicide against the religious principles of his family and church, but it was also against his sister’s personal beliefs. He remembered that when he had had personal troubles and thought of killing himself, “It was Grace that told me not to give up.”

A consulting psychiatrist, Dr. Brian Keefe, testified that Ms. Lee did not think of removing her life support as suicide, but that “she didn’t want to live in the way she was currently forced to live.”