Last night I read Robin Marantz Henig’s beautiful story about Peggy Battin, a bioethicist and advocate for patients who wish to end their lives, and her husband, Brooke Hopkins. A bike accident in 2008 left Brooke paralyzed from the shoulders down and in need of almost constant care. Some days Brooke wants to live; other days he wants to die. And that puts Peggy in a difficult position: “Suffering, suicide, euthanasia, a dignified death — these were subjects she had thought and written about for years, and now, suddenly, they turned unbearably personal. Alongside her physically ravaged husband, she would watch lofty ideas be trumped by reality — and would discover just how messy, raw and muddled the end of life can be,” Marantz Henig writes. Still, Brooke has the ability to make a choice and to communicate that choice. Not everyone has that option. The story made me think of an example from my own life that was both simpler and more complex.
My grandpa had a series of small strokes in his 70s and developed dementia. Grandma cared for him as best she could, but eventually his disease became too much to handle. He would race off in his truck in the middle of the night. Sometimes he would come home; other times he would get lost and end up at a neighbor’s house. Grandpa was strong as an ox. If he wanted to go somewhere, she couldn’t stop him. It was too much for an old woman to handle. So we sent Grandpa to live at the Good Samaritan Center in Park River, North Dakota. His dementia progressed and he stopped recognizing me. Then he stopped recognizing Grandma.
The call came in late May. Grandpa had taken a spill. His head hit the tile floor hard—hard enough to cause his brain to hemorrhage. There was nothing to be done, the doctors said. This was the end. Grandpa wasn’t in any position to make choices, so we chose for him. Don’t prolong this, we said. No feeding tube. No IV. No doubt it’s what he would have wanted.
We expected the end to come quickly, at least I did. How long can a bedridden eighty-two-year-old survive without fluids? A few days, at most, I thought. Yet a week later, we were still waiting for Grandpa to die.
My memories of that week are unreliable at best. I remember accepting cup after cup of watery Folgers despite not being a coffee drinker. I remember watching my dad rub Vaseline on Grandpa’s cracked lips. But mostly I remember waiting. Each time the phone rang, I expected to hear that he was gone. Each time I was relieved and then dismayed.
Grandpa died June 9, 1998. Had he been in the hospital ten days? Two weeks? I don’t remember. But yesterday, when I read about Peggy and Brooke, I couldn’t help but think of Grandpa. I reflected on those last painful days in the hospital. I remembered his cracked lips and sunken eyes. What if some clean-shaven doctor had taken mercy on our family and administered a lethal dose of morphine? Would that have been immoral? Or would it have been extraordinarily humane?
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First image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. Second image via José Goulão on Flickr
Thank you for this. Hopefully someday we will have reasonable laws wrt ending one’s life with dignity.
Thank you for sharing your story, which, as it happens, bears a striking similarity to my own. My Grandpa had always been strong as an ox, his heart was in very good shape, but
he developed Multi Infarct Dementia, ie. ministrokes, over the period of about 1.5-2 years. One day all those ministrokes were too much for his brain to handle and he was taken to the hospital, where he got a CAT scan. His doctor told us he wouldn’t survive very long, especially that he was 93, and that we’d better prepare…Well, his death wasn’t as swift as he would have wanted. Especially that he was given IVs – to be honest I’m not sure if we could have told the doctors to stop the “treatment”, Polish laws are very peculiar with their sanctity of life all over the place. He suffered from more strokes, his digestive system stopped working altogether, they even wanted to operate on him. This is when my mother put her foot down and said “no”. From that moment, he got worse and worse, one organ failing after another. What follows is unsubstatntiated, I can’t swear by it, because mother didn’t want to talk about it, but after 6 weeks in the hospital he was given Chlorpromazine injection to stop throwing up blood, and he died almost instanteously. As I said, Polish laws are crazy, but I know that Chlorpromazine is a very strong medication and at this point Grandpa’s heart was very weak. I would like to believe that the doctor on call that day showed her humanity towards a very, very sick man. Grandpa died in 2001, when I was 27, and I had spent most of those 27 years with him, I was closer to him than to my mother. A day doesn’t pass when something reminds me of him, of his stories about the war in 1920 when he had been a child, his stories about WWII, and his amazing sense of humour and vast knowledge, which dementia took away from him…I don’t believe in afterlife, but I know I am carrying his genes, and this makes me very proud.
Again, thank you for sharing your story.
I think what bothers me the most about this debate is how hypocritical we humans are. We are considered inhumane if we allow any other living creature to suffer pain but are considered immoral if we consider assisting in ending a human life before it’s “natural” lifespan. This is not a clear cut debate but it is one worth having.
Thanks for this lovely post, Cassie. It’s the highest compliment a reader can pay a writer, when the writer’s article has led to a reader’s reflections on something from her own life. Especially when it’s something as deeply felt and as beautifully rendered as this.