TheBanyanTree: Assisted Suicide - the topic of the week

[Monique Colver]

I don't know if assisted suicide is right or wrong, I only know that people
should have options, and that taking away their options isn't good for them,
or for us, because who knows? I may want that option myself some day.

When my ex-husband was dying I sat at his bedside, day after day, doing
nothing more than being there. He had all the heavy lifting to do, all the
work that goes into dying. I had the lightweight work, the sort that is
never quite enough help, but is the most we can, in most cases, do.

He was ready to go. He was so tired of the pain, of not being the same
person anymore, and he wasn't afraid of death at all, but he was very afraid
of dying.

Two entirely different things, aren't they?

How does one enter into not being anymore?

Sometimes he would wake up and see me sitting there, sometimes still holding
my hand, and he would say, "I'm still here," an annoyed statement of fact.

He was still there.

I'd calm him, and tell him everything was going to be okay.

"I don't know how to die," he'd say, the words themselves taking a toll on
him.

"It's okay," I'd tell him, "You can't possibly do this wrong."

He always worried about doing things wrong, and even this, the dying,
concerned him.

We'd give him morphine, his father rubbing it carefully into his arm. He
couldn't take anything by mouth, for it would all come up again, whatever it
was, so the topical morphine was the only thing we could use to ease his
pain.

I'm not sure how effective it was, but it allowed him some sleep, and I
stayed with him as much as I could, until I myself had to sleep, or eat. I
hated leaving his bedside. I'd promised him he'd never be alone.

Sometimes he'd smile at me, a beautiful ray of light, and sometimes, when we
were joking, he'd laugh, though it was more of a soft chuckle that barely
escaped.

I wouldn't have missed being there with him for anything.

The end wasn't clean. He bled out, and though he was far from caring by then
I tried to mop the blood from his face as I held his head, but the blood
came anyway, spilling out of him as if an internal faucet had been turned
on.

He was 37 when he died, two years ago.

Last year, a few days before Thanksgiving, I sat with my Mom. A few nights
before I'd slept with her in the guest room bed, holding her hand. I don't
know if she knew I was there at all. She'd been conscious when I arrived,
and when my brother had arrived, and she'd seen all of us, my sister and
brother and I, together.

And then she was unconscious, and I slept with her that first night, holding
her hand throughout the night, while my sister slept on the floor at the
foot of the bed.

For several days, or a couple of days, I don't even remember, we positioned
her and moved her and my sister, the LPN, gave her meds. We could tell when
she needed morphine, though the signs were subtle. It never hurts to give
extra morphine. She never woke up, and because we had her positioned just so
to prevent bedsores I couldn't sleep with her again, but I'd sit with her.

We kept a baby monitor next to her, so if we were in the other room we could
hear anything, any change at all, and sometimes, when there was the
slightest change, we'd all rush in, to find nothing amiss.

The last night we'd sent my stepfather up to bed, and my sister lay down in
the darkened living room, and I sat at my mother's bedside with my laptop.

And then there was the slightest noise, and it's true, it does sound like a
rattle, and I looked at my mother with her mouth open, and I could see
movement, and then there was a breath, just one soft one, so quiet. And then
there was none. And I held her hand, not knowing if she'd know I was there
or not, but it didn't matter, did it?

There are easy deaths and hard ones, and there are easy decisions and hard
decisions. Death itself is easy, but dying is not. It's complicated and
messy and sometimes we don't know the right thing to do. And sometimes death
takes care of itself, and sometimes it doesn't. All I can do is be there
when it happens.
-- 
Monique Colver