I would need the room for a week. That’s what I told the front-desk
clerk at the Extended Residence Stay America Whatever when I checked in
that Sunday night.
At least a week, I said, maybe longer.
My mother had already been in the hospital across the street for
nearly a week by the time I arrived in Tucson. She was no stranger to
hospitals over the last few years. She’d wake up to find that her
breathing was more difficult, or that some new infection was exploiting
her weakened immune system, or that some new debilitating side effect
from the powerful drugs that were keeping her alive had emerged. My
stepfather would rush her to a hospital, and she would come home a few
days later having accepted some previously feared
development—being hooked up to an oxygen tank, having to use a
walker—as her “new normal.”
The plan: I would stay in Tucson for three or four days and help my
stepfather and aunt look after my mother. Then my brother Billy
would fly in from Chicago, take over the helping-out duties and my
hotel room, and we’d figure out what to do next.
Before going to the hotel on Sunday night, I got to play cards with
my mother and read with her, and things were looking less grim than
they had when my aunt called me in Seattle earlier that day and told me
to get on an airplane. My mother wasn’t getting better, but she wasn’t
getting worse.
My mother had pulmonary fibrosis, a degenerative lung condition, and
we knew enough about the disease to know that dramatic turns for the
worse were a possibility. She knew that pulmonary fibrosis would
eventually end her life, and she’d done some research into just what
sort of an end she could expect. It wasn’t going to be pretty. Her
lungs were gradually filling with scar tissue. She would, when her time
came, slowly and painfully suffocate to death over a period of hours or
days. But eight weeks before she wound up in a sprawling, dung-colored
hospital in sprawling, dung-colored Tucson, my mother’s doctors had
given her two to five years to live.
She’d recently marked the five-year anniversary of her diagnosis, an
anniversary very few pulmonary fibrosis sufferers live to celebrate.
She was terrified, as her fifth anniversary approached, that she
wouldn’t “beat five.” But her spirits lifted when her anniversary came
and went, and her doctors gave her years, not months or weeks, to live.
That’s when she decided to go on this trip with her husband, driving to
California and New Mexico and Arizona. She was looking forward to
attending her first grandson’s high-school graduation, her grade-school
class’s 50th reunion, a Broadway show.
The Seattle Post-Intelligencer‘s Joel Connelly has written
several columns—and several thousand words—blasting
Initiative 1000, the November ballot measure in Washington State that
would make it legal for physicians to prescribe lethal doses of
medication to terminally ill patients. Connelly doesn’t like the
measure because he believes the purpose of a “democratic society” is to
“safeguard and enhance life, especially among the youngest, the
weakest, and the suffering”; because he worries that the movement might
next “seek to expand conditions for the legal ending of life, as has
been done in the Netherlands”; and because out-of-state money has been
collected by supporters of Initiative 1000.
“Should Washington be a launching pad for a movement that seeks to
transform a crime into a ‘medical treatment’?” Connelly thunders.
KUOW has been covering the debate over I-1000, too. In a recent
report, two widows were interviewed about the deaths of their husbands.
After watching their spouses die, one widow planned to vote for I-1000
and the other planned to vote against it.
The woman voting for the initiative—whose husband died of
brain cancer—wants terminally ill people to have a choice at the
end of their lives, a choice to end their suffering and hasten an
inevitable, rapidly approaching death. The woman voting against the
initiative wants—well, she wants what we all want. She wants to
have a good death, a peaceful death, a death like the one her husband,
um, enjoyed.
“I would like to be enveloped in the love of a good caregiver I
would get,” she says.
Don’t we all want that kind of death? Wouldn’t it be wonderful if
each of us could enjoy a Hallmark death? Wouldn’t it be ideal if each
of us passed from this life into the next—aka “the
void”—enveloped in the love of good caregivers and under the care
of competent “pain management” professionals? But not everyone is so
lucky. Some of us have to endure deaths that are gruesome and
protracted and excruciatingly painful, deaths that involve pain that
cannot be “managed,” deaths that our loving caregivers can only stand
helplessly by and witness.
“You don’t know how you’re going to feel at the end of your life,”
the widow planning to vote for I-1000 says. “I want to have the choices
available to me.”
Choices.
Exactly. If I-1000 is approved by Washington State voters, the widow
opposed to the initiative will not be compelled to end her life with
the assistance of a physician. She can choose pain meds and the love of
caregivers and die a “natural” death. (What’s so “natural” about pain
management anyway?) But if I-1000 is rejected, the widow who plans to
vote in favor of it will not have the same choice. She will not be able
to choose to end her life, and end her suffering, if the pain becomes
too much for her to bear.
That’s what the debate about I-1000 is really all about: your body,
your death, your choice. The passage of I-1000 doesn’t impose anything
on terminally ill people who reject physician-assisted suicide for
religious reasons. But the rejection of I-1000 imposes the values of
others on terminally ill people who would like to make that choice for
themselves, who should have a right to make that choice for
themselves.
And, I’m sorry, but there’s nothing about physician-assisted
suicide—or, as it should be called, end-of-life pain
management—that precludes the presence of loving caregivers. You
can be surrounded by love and have access to the best medical care
available and still conclude—reasonably and rationally—that
you would rather not spend the last few moments of your life in
blinding pain or gasping for breath or pumped full of just enough
morphine to (hopefully) deaden your pain without deadening you.
On Monday morning, after eliminating all other possibilities (a
virus, pneumonia, some rare desert fungus), a doctor pulled me and my
stepfather out of my mother’s room. They were out of options. Nothing
more could be done. Her battered lungs were failing; one had a widening
hole in it. Amazingly, the doctor didn’t say, “It’s over, this is it.”
He laid out the facts and we stared at him dumbly for that
world-without-end moment, and then one of us—my stepfather, me, I
don’t remember—finally said, “So this is it?”
The doctor nodded.
We somehow managed to hold it together, me and my stepfather. We
didn’t have the luxury of breaking down. He stepped out of the
intensive-care unit to tell my sister and my aunt the news, to confer
about how we would break the news to my mother, and to call a priest. I
stepped back into her room to sit with her, to hold her hand. I didn’t
tell her what I knew; it wasn’t my place. I would sit with her and wait
for my stepfather to return.
Suddenly, the doctor was at the door to my mother’s room again. He
waved me out into the hall. He needed a medical directive. Immediately.
Her vital signs were tanking. If we were going to put a tube in her,
and put her on machines that could breathe for her, it had to be now.
Right now. So it fell to me to walk back into my mother’s room, tell
her she was going to die, and lay out her rather limited options. She
could be put under and put on machines and live for a day or two in a
coma, long enough for her other two children to get down to Tucson and
say their good-byes, which she wouldn’t be able to hear. Or she could
live for maybe another six hours if she continued to wear an oxygen
mask that forced air into her lungs with so much force it made her
whole body convulse. Or she could take the mask off and suffocate to
death. Slowly, painfully, over an hour or two.
It was her choice.
“No mask,” she said, “no pain.”
Her nurse promised to give her enough morphine to deaden any pain
she might feel after my mother made her choice: She would take off the
mask. She would go now. I told the doctor and then ran sobbing—no
longer trying to hold it together—into the waiting room to get my
stepfather, my sister, and my aunt. Things were worse than they were
five minutes ago. Get in here, I said, get in here now.
We said our good-byes—doesn’t that sound dignified? But her
mask was still on and her body still convulsing. Good-byes reduced my
affable stepfather to wracking sobs; good-byes sent me and my sister
falling to the floor beside our mother’s deathbed. We held a phone up
to my mother’s ear so she could hear one of my brothers shout his
good-bye over the whir and thump of the oxygen machine, while we tried
desperately to get my other brother on the phone.
In the midst of all of this, a hospital orderly breezed into my
mother’s room and handed her a menu to fill out for tomorrow’s meals.
It was a staggering blow, this sudden and unwelcome reminder that
tomorrow was coming and my mother wouldn’t be part of it, and it felt
like we had all just been punched in the stomach. After a
this-can’t-be-
happening pause, my stepfather rose from his chair
and barked so loudly at the orderly that she dropped the menu, which
fluttered to the floor under my mother’s bed.
Then my mother was ready. The mask came off, she held tight to our
hands, and the morphine went in. Her grip slackened. My mother was
still alive, in there somewhere, beyond our reach. Was she in pain? We
don’t know. She couldn’t talk to us now, or focus on us, but she was
awake, her eyes open. She gasped for breath, again and again, and we
sat there, traumatized, waiting for her heart to stop, waiting for the
very first sound that I had ever heard—my mother’s heart
beating—to go silent.
People must accept death at “the hour chosen by God,” according to
Pope Benedict XVI, leader of the Catholic Church, which is pouring
money into the campaign against I-1000.
The hour chosen by God? What does that even mean? Without the
intervention of man—and medical science—my mother would
have died years earlier. And at the end, even without assisted suicide
as an option, my mother had to make her choices. Two hours with the
mask off? Six with the mask on? Another two days hooked up to machines?
Once things were hopeless, she chose the quickest, if not the easiest,
exit. Mask off, two hours. That was my mother’s choice, not God’s.
Did my mother commit suicide? I wonder what the pope might say.
I know what my mother would say: The same church leaders who can’t
manage to keep priests from raping children aren’t entitled to
micromanage the final moments of our lives.
If religious people believe assisted suicide is wrong, they have a
right to say so. Same for gay marriage and abortion. They oppose them
for religious reasons, but it’s somehow not enough for them to deny
those things to themselves. They have to rush into your intimate life
and deny them to you, too—deny you control over your own
reproductive organs, deny you the spouse of your choosing, condemn you
to pain (or the terror of it) at the end of your life.
The proper response to religious opposition to choice or love or
death can be reduced to a series of bumper stickers: Don’t approve of
abortion? Don’t have one. Don’t approve of gay marriage? Don’t have
one. Don’t approve of physician-assisted suicide? For Christ’s sake,
don’t have one. But don’t tell me I can’t have one—each
one—because it offends your God.
Fuck your God.
They gave my mother some more morphine—not enough to kill her,
only enough to deaden the pain while her lungs finished her off. Still:
Was she in pain? I’m haunted by the thought that she could have
been in pain—the pain we promised to spare her—but had no
way to tell us, no way to ask for more painkillers, no way to let us
know that she needed us, that she needed our help, that she needed us
to do whatever we could to hasten her inevitable death and end her
suffering.
I don’t know what my mother would have done if she had had the
choice to take a few pills and skip the last two hours of her life. She
was a practicing Catholic. But she was also pro-choice, pro–gay
marriage, pro–ordaining women. If she could’ve committed suicide,
by her own hand, with a doctor “assisting” only by providing her with
drugs and allowing her to administer them to herself, after saying her
good-byes, I suspect she would have done so, so great was her fear of
dying in pain.
I do know that she should have been allowed to make that choice for
herself. It’s not a choice that Joel Connelly—or the Catholic
Church—had a right to make for her.
I also know that, if my mother needed my help, I would’ve held a
glass of water to her lips, so that she could swallow the pills that
would’ve spared her those two hours of agony.
And that shouldn’t be a crime.
She whom we love
and lose
is no longer
where she was before.
She is now
wherever we are.
St. John Chrysostom
I cannot express my agreement with “Yes on I-1000” strongly enough, and your mother’s situation is an example. It appears that she had a reasonably peaceful death, but she might have chosen differently earlier in the progression of her illness if the option had been available to her. I’m 71 years old, still healthy, and a firm believer that what happens to me at the end of my life should be MY choice. I’m 100% nonreligious and strongly resent the intrusion of religious types into what should be a personal decision between the patient and her doctor. What I do with MY body is no business of theirs. I thought that 40 years ago when I was concerned about a woman’s ability to terminate an unwanted pregnancy and I think that now when the issue will be how I choose t0 end my life.
I am glad you wrote this Dan. My condolences to you.
My father died 5 weeks ago after suffering with colon cancer for 2 years. He finally stopped chemo when the tests came back that it wasn’t helping much…he wanted a better quality of life until he died. I wonder if Connelly would think that anyone who did that was trying to kill themselves.
His body eventually broke down so much that his legs stopped working (not sure how to describe it other than he just lost the ability to move around.) A short time later he was found by police on a welfare call from the neighbors. His body temp was 79 degrees and all of his organs were shutting down.
When the doctors were warming his body up in an effort to save him, he was fighting them…would that be considered suicide? 14 hours later he was gone. But really, how much pain was he in? I know he would have had doctors help him once his mobility was gone. Once he would have depended on others to do the basic functions of life. Instead he died, alone and in pain. This is the memory I will have of the end of my fathers life….and that hurts.
Thank you for sharing your story, and I’m so sorry for your loss.
Everyone should have a choice about how to end their life. I think it would be very difficult for me to choose to die, but I would never want to deny that choice to others.
Dan:
I’ve been reading you since you started Savage Love, and feel you have given your readers the gift of a substantial
amount the wisdom and perspective that characterized your mom. You shared with us how she helped you be the person you are, and quoted her enough that I feel like I got to know her a little bit through you. Thank you for sharing this so personal righteous fury. Your mom rocked, and she, as well as the rest of us should get to pass the way we want to, but simple things like that are easily lost in the haze of superstition. Now, though, from a Catholic mom perspective…We should all pass with our children and loved ones weeping at our feet..you and I are from similar backgrounds Dan, and I can see a heaven where she’s sitting around a card table with the friends she loved the most looking exactly the way she is in her own minds eye, telling the story to her friends…and she is proud of the dignity with which she passed, because although she may have been terrified of dying in pain, according the the rules of the game of life that you sign up for as a Christian, that may be a possibility and to win at the game and go to heaven, you may have to die that way. So she did. And she did – she won .
Jesus died in pain and Christians believed they are somehow purified by the agony he suffered, and have been living through this for two thousand years. They’ve got it all wrong. They’ve taken some teachings from a nice Jewish revolutionary and wrapped a death cult around it. So yes, fuck that particular version of god.
And I know I would hold the glass to my Mom’s lips too, but then she wouldn’t get to win her particular version of the game and that’s important. Your Mom had you right there with her and got choices, and her family in puddles at her feet- in my book you did just right by her…..love you Dan, keep it comin’ read “if”
While your piece did not convince me (as I couldn’t agree more with you than I already do), it did reduce me to tears. Thank you for that beautiful piece, and I’m so, so sorry.
Oh, Dan. I’m so sorry your and your family had to endure such suffering. This piece was absolutely gut-wrenching, and I don’t see how someone could read it and come out against this initiative. Compassion and common sense demand that this pass.
My deepest condolences to your family, and I dearly hope the morphine eased your mom’s last moments here. So, so sorry.
Thank you for this angry and intelligent and fair and reasonable and truly human face that you have put on this issue. Great Job.
While I already believed in being able to choose to end your suffering with dignity and without pain, and thus this was a bit of preaching to the choir – even if I did not your story would have convinced me. I was brought to tears by it and once more am deeply sorry for your loss.
Damn straight, Mr. Savage; that is a child’s duty, and an honor.
That was incredibly powerful. Thank you for writing it.
Dan,
Thank you for sharing this with us – you family ar ein my thoughts, and your suffering is on the hands of all those who conspired to deny your mother the right to an easy death.
Thank you for your courage and wisdom
Rog
Heavens, this made me cry. You’re absolutely right, Dan, noone should have to go through that shit – I know I’d rather end my own life, on my own terms and of my own volition, than die slowly and/or in pain.
Any dog who’s terminally ill gets better treatment than that. Nobody would object taking a dog to the vet and putting him to sleep when there’s no chance for recovery anymore and when the only choice is whether his death should be slow and painful or quick and painless, yet we don’t do the same thing for humans; we aren’t allowed to, and just because some old fart in a funny hat in Rome thinks it’s against his religion.
It’s insane.
Thank you for sharing this….
My condolences to you and your family.
I cried.
I live in the Netherlands and I’m so glad I have these options available to me. My father didn’t have them, my mother did. She didn’t need them in the end but it was of great comfort to know she could leave at a moment’s notice. That was probably the best pain-management she had in her last month.
Dan, my condolences and I wish you and your family a lot of strength in the days and weeks and months and years ahead.
Superb Dan. Thanks for turing your tragedy into a learning moment for the rest of us. I admire your courage and prose.
Jesus, Dan, I am so sorry…
I have been a nurse for 24 years. helath care people have been quietly speeding the death of patients for hundreds of years. Your mom’s nurse should have medicated her more often after asking you if she seemed to be in pain.
I was deeply moved by the eloquence of your words. I totally agree that death with dignity should be an available option.
You enjoy the best wishes of your wide audience.
Ivar Husa
Euthanasia is a sin, until the Pope does it. Pope John Paul turned down medical treatment and his final words were “Let me go to the house of the Father” according to documents released by the Vatican. Details at tinyurl.com/3l7krn
I wish you and your family well. Thank you for letting your mother make her choice. You are right. Fuck their god!
i’m really glad you have had this opportunity to express yourself but sad at the experiences you report.
your mothers pain pains me too.
your views seem reasonable and balanced and would be supported by the majority of my countrymen and many other countries that REALLY honour peoples lives individually by giving them the space to be logically and rationally decisive.
this is what people deserve in the advanced civilisation we have created.
anyone that would like to see progress in the arena of self determination would be well advised never to vote for anyone that believes in god. people that believe in god also believe they know what is the best for you. that is, they believe you are not capable of making the best decision for yourself because god is the only one that can.
what a load of nonsense.
Twice today I have wanted to cheer for you.
thank you for saying what you say.
Warm thoughts, mental hugs, and lots of good wishes to you and your family Dan. I recently went through nearly the identical situation, watching my father die of COPD, so I can relate.
It took three days of his struggling for every breath. For the first two days, he was medicated with narcotics at a level that deadened any physical pain, but left him conscious and alert, so he got to experience the horrible feeling of desperately trying to breath.
(Folks, if you’d like an empirical experience, take a pencil, and use it to punch a SMALL hole in a baggie. Then hold that baggie to your face and try to breathe through it. See if you can make it for 5 minutes struggling for each breath before you can’t stand it any more. Now, contemplate TWO DAYS AND NIGHTS of that sensation, with your only choice at the end of those two days being death.)
Finally(!!), the doctors and nurses increased his prescription level to the point where he was essentially unconscious for the last 4 or 5 hours of his life.
My dad was at least semi-religious, so I don’t know if he would have chosen an assisted suicide if it were available. But under those same circumstances, I know that *I* would have.
Does that make me weak in the eyes of some? Does that offend the religiosity of some? I don’t much care.
It’s my life, it’s my death. It’s none of anybody else’s freaking business. I’ll make the choice. If the time comes for that choice, and the choice is still illegal, then I’ll figure out a way to smuggle a Hemlock and Seconal smoothie into the ICU.
Thank you, Dan, for sharing that beautiful essay. I don’t remember ever reading something in the Stranger that made me cry like that.
Dan,
I am truly sorry to hear about what you went through. I lost my father to suicide earlier this year, and a friend of mine lost hers about a year ago in a similar fashion to what happened to you. The only difference was, her family was forced to to make the decision to take her father off life support, which was an unthinkable position for anyone to be in.
Just cherish all of the joy that she brought you in her lifetime. It’s going to be painful, whether you watched your loved one die, or whether it was sudden and shocking as in the case of my father. This is what I wrote about it a few days after Dad died:
http://listentoleon.net/index.php/2008/04/09/i-love-you-dad/
It helped a lot to get things off my chest, so I’m sure that your writing this will prove therapeutic in the long run. Stay strong.
Leon
“Every society that has adopted these laws, sooner or later, falls prey to indifference and apathy over the killing of supposedly unproductive human beings. That spreads to all of us.”
Got actual evidence?
There is currently a discussion of this article and issue at Metafilter
http://www.metafilter.com/75546/Death-with-dignity
The “those who’re opposed have the option not to” argument can be used to argue in favor of all sorts of things. If you’re against rape, then don’t rape someone. If you’re opposed to murder, child molestation, domestic violence, the looting of the third world’s resources, etc., then don’t do it. Just don’t interfere with my “right” to do so. Situational ethics once again. There’s no ultimate right or wrong, and everything — everything — becomes permissible. Do you want NAMBLA (North American Man-Boy Love Association) to have that opportunity? You can even justify terrorist acts that way.
Dan – I fell in love with your mother when she would join you on your KCMU radio program. She (and you) are rare, precious people.
Bruce
Mike T. Said:
“The “those who’re opposed have the option not to” argument can be used to argue in favor of all sorts of things…”
Your argument is deeply flawed. Everything you listed involves an interaction without the consent of all parties. In contrast, I-1000 is about people’s right to control THEIR OWN lives. Can you see the difference?
Dan, I just have to say I’m weeping for you, your family, your mother, and all of us who have had or will have to face this situation.
You’re right about what the compassionate and sane option is.
This is the most moving defense of assisted suicide I’ve ever read. Thank you for sharing your story (given how difficult it was to read, I can only imagine how hard it was to write). It angers me that these people – religious or otherwise – who pretend to care so much about life, give no thought to what that life consists of. They completely ignore happiness and emotional or physical pain simply because they refuse to acknowledge that what constitutes life isn’t black-or-white. How can they possibly believe forcing someone to survive in a state of unknown pain is part of “God’s plan” instead of torture? How dare they claim that denying someone’s basic right to be legally (in addition to emotionally and sometimes spiritually) bound to the one they love is “pro-life”? Nothing could be more “anti-life”. If pro-life means pro-a life stripped of liberty, individualism, dignity, or happiness, then I could not be more “anti-life”. If, however, we consider a “pro-life” position to be in support of happiness and freedom, in favor of living life to one’s fullest potential, then I, and you (my good sir) are two of the most adamant defenders of life I know.
Dan – I’ve enjoyed your cutting, valuable insights for years now. Thank you for writing this column at such a difficult time…what you’ve said is so important, and needs to be heard.
I had to make choices about the end of my son’s life, and the legal right to make those choices was so absolutely critical to doing the right thing for him. To not have those rights would have made letting go of my son (unimaginably) more difficult than it was. Thank you for using your public forum to share this stuff. I didn’t know your mother, but from what you’ve written about her, I’m sure she would be proud of you.
Dan:
Thank you.
First and foremost, my condolences to you and your family, Dan.
When my mother sat my brother and I down one day three years ago and told us my grandfather was dying, we did what a grown daughter and an old-enough son should do. We held her hands when tears streamed down her face, telling us he had stage four lung cancer (which made sense, he smoked his entire life) and he had less than three months to live. Something inside of me knew he wouldn’t last that long, and my mother must have known, too. She flew up to New Jersey and didn’t come back until he was gone. It was decided we would go to our first days of school, and we would leave immediately when something happened.
The day or two before school started, I got The Phone Call. The one where my grandfather was definitely going to die much sooner than anyone expected (even though everybody kinda knew) and I needed to say goodbye. I don’t remember what I said, other than the words, “I love you” about fifty billion times. It was sad. My mother’s boyfriend at the time (who had just entered our lives within the last two years, and wouldn’t marry her until the following year) wasn’t much use, but my brother held my hand for much of the next several days.
As was my custom at the time, I had lunch with my grandmother before my afternoon class. When I came inside, she held me tighter than usual and kissed my cheek and told me he was gone, that he had died two hours ago. I cried for a while, we talked, and I went to my night class as though nothing had happened.
We, my future step-father, my brother, and I, left at four the following morning and drove from Floria to New Jersey to go to the funeral. I didn’t cry until they started playing Taps, which I didn’t expect-it wasn’t a church funeral (he wasn’t terribly religious), and though he was in the service, I was a 20-something anti-war hippie and didn’t think I would cry. I cried like a fucking baby, and one of my many cousins had to hold my hand for the rest of it.
I often wonder what he would think of me. He, born in the 30s, veteran of two wars, who in life thought the purple nail polish I favored was a little garish and unbecoming to a woman, had a grandchild who moved to the big city and chose to live her life on her own terms. How he would feel if he knew a black man was running for president, and that some of his children and nearly all his of-age grandchildren were voting for him.
I remember my mother telling me he knew he was going to die on Monday (he did) and that all he wanted to do was die at home. He did not. He had no time to get his affairs in order, beyond various agreements with his children. He barely had time to get the rest of the abnormally large extended family on the phone before he died.
I’ve never had the nerve to ask my mother if he had had the opportunity to make the choice to take a little too much medication and go when he was ready. I hope he did. Every terminal patient should. And I would have helped him.
Thank you for sharing your story with us Dan. My heart goes out to you. 1000 has my yes vote.
That’s the story no god worshiper ever thinks about when they come out against the right to die. Love and peace to you and your family…and your mom.
I wrote this as a response to your article, Dave :
The day before my father died
http://culturekitchen.com/liza/blog/the_day_before_my_father_died
Thanks so much for talking this incredibly important issue. If I could vote for Initiative 1000, I would.
You have my deepest sympathy on the death of your mother.
If we are denied autonomy over our physical bodies, then what rights do we truly have? Self determination has to include the right to determine the manner and time of one’s death, should one so choose.
–a hospice nurse
Thank you for your family’s story, Dan. I can’t really express my gratitude properly right now, because my own mother just passed away on October 8, after a brief but painful struggle with cancer. In the moment of her dying, we were unable to persuade the EMT’s that her long-standing “Do Not Resuscitate” order was a valid legal document (this was in Michigan), and she suffered under their attentions for most of an hour.
It’s my sincerest hope that Initiative 1000 passes, to spare other suffering patients and their families what ours went through. My mother was a staunch supporter of choice in dying, and was fully aware but unable to express her wishes. In her memory, I ask all who read this to consider the magnitude of suffering in the world and grant others the ability to choose for themselves how they will pass from among us.
So I’m not the only one brought to tears at work. Powerful piece.
My dad has moved from “don’t let her (my mom) unplug me” to “you’ll find my corpse in the woods, frozen, with a bottle of liquor, when it’s my time to go”.
Thank you for writing this. I had a very similar experience with my Mother as she died about one year ago. It was such a powerful experience and you captured it beautifully. The arguments over I-1000 make my head hurt. I fully respect a religious objection but simply cannot understand the need to impose that view on those of us who support the initiative.
So beautifully and compellingly written- it hurt to read it.
Thank you Dan.
My sympathies to you and your family, and I salute your for your courage in speaking up.
My father went through a similar ordeal with non-Hodgkins lymphoma. In a better world, he wouldn’t have had to suffer through his last month of life.
I watched my grandfather die while tied against his explicit living will because the Las Vegas hospital decided to misplace it and deny knowing about it. I saw him spend days withering under relentless painful double lung cancer. Finally, even the machines began to fail to keep him alive, and the hospital belatedly agreed to disconnect him when the air pumps could no longer function correctly.
Thanks, Las Vegas. I salute you Dan. You handled it. I cried so hard it scared me. I hated to see him suffer because religion was used to predetermine his rights.
Demopoly
Well Said. My condolences to you and your family. Thank you for speaking out and for doing so so eloquently.
Dear Dan,
Thank you so much for writing about this. I can’t imagine how much strength it must have taken to write, let alone publish. Ever since a debate class in high school, I’ve been on the fence about this topic. But as I sat in the Woodinville Park & Ride reading this today, I couldn’t help but burst into uncontrollable sobs. You are so right. This is so well written, and I think your strongest argument is the one about “the hour chosen by God”. If we can preserve people in vegetated states, why can’t we release them into their final relief, if they so chose? Thank you, Dan, for really opening my eyes to this. I know what I’ll be voting.
I am a grown man who wept alone in a Wallingford coffee house today reading your article. The hardest thing to do in life is indeed life its self, to be mortal. I recently cooked dinner at the Bailey-Boushay House and had the honor to be surrounded by people who would have an ultimately unique perspective on this article I’m sure. Thank you Dan.
– Garin Wedeking
Dan, I am so sorry for your loss. I have so much admiration for your mother, what I know of her from your books. Thank you, as always, for defending choice.
Do you have a link that I could throw money at to help the cause?
This summer I read aloud “The Commitment” to my boyfriend. We loved “The Mad Clipper.” We are so sorry for your loss.