A Helping Hand

My mother recently had a physician assisted death, and because I want to demystify the process for other people, I wrote a column that I hoped to get published - for payment - in a Canadian newspaper. Alas, the Globe turned me down, perhaps because I was submitting it to Comment, since First Person doesn't pay, and the column isn't suitable for Comment. I decided to skip the Star because it doesn't publish this sort of column, either, and Postmedia, well, I guess I got all the money I'll ever get from that racket because unless you're one of the few survivors on the Ottawa Citizen's staff, forget it.

But that's okay because I really just want to get the word out about physician assisted dying and don't much care if I'm published in a Canadian newspaper anymore. The money isn't worth the freelance agreement, to be perfectly frank. So I'm blogging my column here and I invite all ye who pass this way to share it if that's what you'd like to do. I'm not on Twitter or I'd tweet it so feel free to tweet it for me if you'd like.

In the meantime, thanks for reading.

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Two weeks after her 95^th birthday, in her room at a nursing home in Sault Ste. Marie, attended to by two young middle-aged female doctors and witnessed by three of her four children and our partners, my mother had a physician assisted death.

It was what she wanted. In fact, as soon as she found out she might qualify, about three weeks earlier, her mood brightened and she looked forward to the future as she had not done in years. Meanwhile, we who knew how much she wanted to die, and so wanted her to die, too, held our breath that nothing and nobody would get in her way.

The process began in late March, when my mother formally requested a physician assisted death. The request had to be made by her, she had to be of sound mind to make it, and she had to remain of sound mind right up until the end when she would be asked one final time if she still wanted to go ahead. No one who might benefit financially from her death could be involved at any point in the process. And there was no guarantee that she would even qualify for it, the bill that was passed into law being so restrictive that Rob Oliphant, my mother’s friend and the Liberal MP and co-chair of the committee responsible for consulting on and drafting the original bill, couldn’t, in the end, bring himself to vote for it.

I’m not sure how a person with the disabilities my mother had, who doesn’t have people at the ready to manage the process for them, would fare. A niece and grand-niece managed it all for my mother, both of them fluent in healthcare, and in fairly short order she was assessed by one doctor to see if she met the criteria, then another doctor about a week or so later. Both doctors determined that she qualified but I don’t think I fully exhaled that breath I’d been holding until an hour or so after my mother’s body had been cremated.

I have to say, it felt like such a privilege to be able to be in the room with my mother while her life was ended for her, it really did. Prior to the procedure we were asked to leave the room so that the doctors, with a representative of the nursing home present, could ask my mother, lying in bed, dressed for the day as per usual, one final time if this was what she wanted. Then we were invited back into the room. We seated ourselves around her bed, my mother said she loved us all and we yelled into her ear (she was very hard of hearing - in spite of hearing aids) how proud we were of her.

The doctor performing the procedure kept us informed as she administered a sedative to relax my mother, and then the anesthetic that would end her life.

After the doctor was done, and it's hardly any time at all, she brushed away a tear, telling us that she’d become very fond of my mother in the short time she’d known her, impressed by her determination to live life on her own terms to the last.

That was my mother, only too happy to show everybody else the way.

Ironically, it was her tough heart that was preventing my mother from going naturally (although death from natural causes is what goes on the death certificate after a physician assisted death). She could no longer see to read or watch television or even recognize our faces, her hearing was impaired to the point that people had to shout in her ear to be heard (in spite of hearing aids, as noted above). Her hands, which hadn’t functioned for years (she could no longer feed herself) now caused her pain. Her feet had gone the same way as her hands; she had no balance and required assistance going to the bathroom.

(Nursing homes push diapers on residents pretty shamelessly. There's no percentage it seems in being continent.)

Even buzzing for that assistance had become so tricky that I once visited to find her sitting on the side of her bed clutching the buzzer in case she had to go, a buzzer in hand worth two anywhere else. That was before she ended up strapped into her wheelchair so that she wouldn’t pitch forward to the floor if she fell asleep.

More recently, possibly due to the medications prescribed for sleep, she seemed to suffer from waking nightmares.

(I won't go into the drugs my formerly drug-free mother had prescribed to her in later years because I don't want blood to shoot out my ears due to a sudden and dramatic rise in pressure.)

But still her heart wouldn’t give out and let her go.

Yes, there are people in worse circumstances who have every desire to keep on living, but my mother wasn’t one of them. She had certainly experienced adversity in her life, having been born in 1924 into a family of very limited means, and years later losing her husband to cancer, leaving her to raise me and my siblings, aged 1, 4, 7, and 9 on her own.

But she also went to and hosted a lot of parties, traveled around the world a dozen times over with friends, enjoyed her career as a high school librarian, and happily devoted time and money to getting Liberals elected to public office. Back in the day, I would often hear her voice on the morning news, the first female chair of the planning board. That was my mother, either on her way to a meeting, getting ready to host a party, or packing a suitcase for a trip.

Years ago now, in the seniors’ residence she lived in before the nursing home, I said to her, “You thought you’d die in your sleep one night in our house on Poplar.” And she said, “Yes.” She didn’t have to add that she wished she had.

Some people do old age better than others.

My mother used to say that life is for the living, but in the past couple of years she took to saying that she wasn’t living, she was just existing. What I want now is for our assisted dying legislation to allow for more Canadians to avail themselves of this humane life ending procedure. My mother, I know, would happily have scheduled her death at least two years sooner than she did, if not more, to save herself the pointless suffering.

It’s a good thing, physician assisted dying, but it should be a lot better.