Family Values

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.