Dan Savage has an incredibly moving story about the day his mother died.

In In Defense of Dignity, he talks about how he watched his mother die, slowly asphyxiating under the dead weight of pulmonary fibrosis:

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."

I urge you to read his account, especially if you live in Washington state, where they are considering Initiative 1000, a measure that would make it legal for physicians to prescribe lethal doses of medication to terminally ill patients.

I have a similar story albeit not so pretty.

My father had given me a proxy some years before he fell ill. He an I had a long history of butting heads but when it came down to it, it was because I was the one from his eight children that was temperamentally the closest to him.

It's why my father trusted me with his life or in this case, his end of life. He knew I'd fight for his right to die. He knew I'd stop anybody from forcing him into a life he didn't want.

Unfortunately he didn't know I would fail so miserably the first time around.

My dad's health had been waxing and waning for years no thanks to his inability to control his diabetes and heart disease. He'd had "mini-strokes" and "diabetic strokes" on a recurrent basis on the years before he became completely incapacitated.

The last mini-stroke landed him in the hospital for far too long causing him a urinary tract infection that developed into sepsis. This happened within the course of a week or two and it was during this time in the hospital that my father died and was resuscitated.

Unfortunately, his "wife" (they weren't legally married) had strong opinions about what do with my father in the case of an emergency   --and she didn't like me. So she went completely contrary to what my father had specifically put into writing. Not only that, she knew she was going against the directive he had written and for that reason didn't call me until two weeks too late.

When I finally was able to see my father, he was completely incapacitated.  He couldn't talk, he could barely open his mouth. He couldn't move his arms or legs or even sit up on a bed. He could hardly move his head and it was either with his eyes that he could really communicate or the occasional scream.

My father would scream every time he'd see me come into his nursing home room. Sometimes inaudibly when he'd loook at me and wouldn't recognize me. I wear my hear in braids most of the time because  as a child my dad would say I looked like his maternal grandmother, Juana Wenseslau. So I'd come to his room always with my braids because he'd yelp and then smile as if to say "you got me again".

Other times he would howl and grind his teeth.

My dad was a very proud, somewhat arrogant man. He was extremely good looking and strong as a horse. He was proud of his health practices, of his life long commitment to exercise and rejection of drugs and alcohol. He instilled those practices on my brother and me like they were a religion. "Your body is a temple" he would say, "Take care of it".

My father had been one of the athletes in Puerto Rico's first Olympic delegation (1948, London). He had won a couple of bronze medals, one in a Pan-American and another in a Central American Olympic competition.

It's why he'd tell me, "just because your girl you don't have to throw like one". My mom was also sporty and while she was better than him at baseball (a sport, by the way, his father used to play semi-professionally), my father was awesome at basketball and, of course, track and field. He taught me how to run professionally (yes, there's a running science), how to sprint, how to long jump and jump hurdles (which was his medal).

My dad was so well regarded as an athlete that Puerto Rico's Olympic Commission had his image jumping hurdles as their logo for almost 20 years.

And then, there was his years as a professional mambo dancer, as one of the Mambo Jets. My dad had opened shows for Perez Prado, Duke Ellington, Tito Puente and others during the golden years of mambo and The Palladium.

It's why I could understand why my dad would howl at me most of the time I'd go to see him. I knew it was not in anger at me, but in frustration. I knew it was torture for him to be "encased" in a useless body.

I knew my father was in agony and it killed me every time I'd go see him. I'd cry every time and apologize every time for not being there to stop the woman he had been living with from putting him into a situation that I knew was torture for him.

Then one day he caught a pneumonia that wouldn't go away.

I knew this was going to be the time to do it. I went several times to see him, hoping to talk directly to the doctor (the "wife" would make sure I had no information available from the doctors).

I hit pay dirt. I was able to have a long conversation with his doctor and was able to show him the letter that "the wife" had chose to ignore two years before. He said he'd have a talk with "the wife" and that he would keep my dad as comfortable as possible but make sure no directives would be forced.

I went back to my dad and had told him that over my dead body I would let them keep him alive. I got really close and whispered to him that it was ok to go, that it was ok to die. I lay there in bed with him for a little while, rubbing his feet the way he'd do to me when I was a little girl. He blinked back at me in tears and went to sleep.

He was dead the next morning.

I can't tell you the relief I felt. I rushed to the hospital. I wanted to be the one to identify him at the morgue. I wanted to make sure I had did the right thing this time around.

When they took me down to the basement, the rooms got colder and colder. Instead of pulling him out from a "filing cabinet" like they do in the movies, my dad's frail and disease ravaged body was wrapped in a shroud with only his face visible.

He looked at peace. For two years I had gone into his room to see him grinding his teeth while he slept, with a grimace of despair.

I could at last say he died in peace.

I knew he wasn't in pain anymore. Not just physical pain, but the emotional pain. I knew he suffered deeply from the humiliation of having been such an active man in his lifetime to end the way he had ended.

To this day I cry thinking of those two long years he had to suffer.

I wish I had been there to stop them the first time around. It's a horrible, terrible weight of  grief and guilt that I will take to my grave. I feel it's my fault that he had to suffer so much during those two last years of his life.

My father died 5 years ago.

If you live in Washington state, I would urge to vote YES for Proposition 1000.

Nobody should be robbed of their dignity when it's their time to die.

Nobody.