It shouldn’t have been that way. We both wanted Toni’s suffering to end with her dying peacefully in my arms, but Washington state’s supposedly enlightened “Death with Dignity” law wouldn’t let her.
Despite first-class medical care, her disease, one of the many variants of ALS, was slowly grinding her down.
We knew what lay ahead. Her brother had recently died of the same disease, and she didn’t want a repeat of the prolonged misery that he and his family endured.
Our current law says that to get aid in dying a patient must have a diagnosis of natural death within six months. But because her disease was slow and inexorable, it would mean more years of suffering before she could qualify for medically aided death.
Finally, after about eight years of decline, the force and bewildering variety of her symptoms overwhelmed her uncommon ability to extract every last drop of fun out of living. Her effervescence still shined on occasion, but less and less. We knew that Wild Thing (my pet name for her) would have to figure out how to end it all.
And not merely how to do it. Because she didn’t qualify for medical aid in dying, she would have to do it alone.
I hate this fact.
It’s bad enough that nature deprived us of an expected 25 more years of love, but it breaks my heart that our poorly formulated laws prevented me, and everyone else, from giving her aid and comfort during the planning and carrying it out. If it appeared that I had assisted in any way, I would be in legal jeopardy. (...)
But how does a person decide when the pain is persistent enough, when the happiness is rare enough, to actually do it? The story of the frog in slowly heating water comes to mind. If anybody could resolve to do it without discussing plans with anyone, and then accomplish it, it would be Toni.
I am fiercely proud of her bravery and force of will.
But I’m also angry because we, as citizens in charge of our laws, have badly failed her and many others. We need to improve these laws as Canada’s Parliament did in 2016.
We should drop the six-month requirement and keep the requirements that a patient have a grievous and irremediable medical condition, an advanced state of decline and unbearable suffering from the illness. And we should keep the more general safeguards regarding the patient’s age, mental health, informed consent, unacceptable motives, pressure from family or others, et cetera.
If Washington had such law, we and our loved ones would have come together for a wonderful and tearful goodbye, rather than attend a memorial service. And Toni’s last moments would have been in my warm, loving embrace.
by Peter Haley, Seattle Times | Read more:
Image: Peter Haley
[ed. The DwD process is unnecessarily convoluted (on purpose). All our lives (from birth) we're expected to take responsibility for ourselves and maintain self-control, then near the end that control is taken away. Why exactly? Because it's morally wrong to have agency over your own life?
***
Contrast End of Life's mission statement:
Our mission is to guide people in preparing for the final days of their lives. We believe that a peaceful death should be within reach of everyone and that no one should face intolerable suffering at the end of life. We promote advance planning and envision a day when all Washington residents will make informed decisions so they may experience peaceful deaths consistent with their values.
... with those expressed, for example, in: The European Way to Die by Michel Houellebecq (Harper's), which seem (to me) mean and incoherent:]
Little by little, and without anyone’s objecting—or even seeming to notice—our civil law has moved away from the moral law whose fulfillment should be its sole purpose. It is difficult and exhausting to live in a country where the laws are held in contempt, whether they sanction acts that have nothing to do with morality or condone acts that are morally abject. But it’s even worse to live among people whom one begins to disdain for their submission to these laws they hold in contempt as well as for their greediness in demanding new ones. An assisted suicide—in which a doctor prescribes a lethal cocktail that the patient self-administers under circumstances of his own choosing—is still a suicide.
We are demonstrating once again our feeble respect for individual liberty and an unhealthy appetite for micromanagement—a state of affairs we deceptively call welfare but is more accurately described as servitude. This mixture of extreme infantilization, whereby one grants a physician the right to end one’s life, and a petulant desire for “ultimate liberty” is a combination that, quite frankly, disgusts me.
