How I Live With My Mothers Choice of Medical Assistance in Dying

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my mother

was always afraid of cancer she feared

the long and painful death

that cancer would mean she was sure

it would get her through her stomach so

for decades

she ate food like it was poison

when she was admitted into hospital she

was diagnosed with the exact

inoperable cancer that she had feared

she asked for and received

a medically assisted death

and that’s what i want to talk to you

about my experience with our right

to choose when and how we die

once my mother got her permission

she was so relieved her appetite was

reborn

for the 12 days between permission and

procedure she ate and she ate

like she was going to die in a

delicatessen

she grew strong round her

she got out of that hospital bed took

her walker

and went to the hospital ground park and

there she fed the birds

and she reminisced for longer and longer

each day my brother and i

went to visit her people whose relatives

were

terminal on her ward used to come and

see her

just to see someone getting better

they went home hopeful and when my

mother died

me holding her hand she was as

pink cheeked and happy with life as i’d

ever seen her

most of the argument about medical

assistance in dying

made for short has been about

making it available for people in my

mother’s situation

there’s not a lot of information out

there to prepare you

for what you’re going to do respecting

your loved one’s wish

to die

a loved one may never come to you

and ask you to respect their wish to

leave their bodies behind

but for everyone in canada

now they could

this is how i make sense of it

the dutch who’ve had a lot more

experience with this than we have

they call it a stage death

and it is for the entire time of the

process

everything should be the way the person

is going to die wants it

on her final day my mother told my

brother and i not to cry

so we didn’t instead

we read alternate verses from ode to a

nightingale

the poem that contained her favorite

line in poetry

half in love with easeful death

my mother’s doctor was a kind woman

she never took her eyes off my mother

while she did her work

my mother loved to be looked at that way

when she had your attention she’d tell

you stories

she started to brag about the

achievements of her sons

mine in poetry and my brother’s in

and that’s where her voice trailed off

and she went to sleep

she snored a little and then went quiet

ten minutes later the doctor listened to

her heart

and said she’s gone

there are hundreds of people thousands

like me who have helped their loved ones

die this way

if i didn’t believe that my mother had a

right to that choice

i wouldn’t have been beside her when she

did

but medical assistance in dying is an

emotional

awkward subject so there aren’t that

many stories

about people like us who are left behind

when i think of the documentaries i saw

i see the camera turning away from the

person

who’s going to die to the people beside

their bed

both participants and witnesses

they ask the camera asks them

how does it feel they say they are

grateful and happy for their loved one

they also say it was surreal

or i was torn

the camera never lingers on the

complexities behind those

simple sentences

it is surreal i was torn

for a long time i couldn’t shake the

feeling

that i had betrayed my mother and myself

i know i’m not alone

but that’s not enough

i wanted something to connect my

individual experience

to something larger than individual

experience

i’m a poet i’m a professor of english

my earliest memory of my mother’s voice

is her

reading to me as a child

i needed the comfort and wisdom of an

old story

an old story about something as new as

medical assistance in dying you think

that would be impossible to find

and i won’t tell you how many things i

went through to get one

but i found one in a very surprising

place to me

it was in the bible’s account of peter’s

denial of christ

i’m an atheist there’s no story in the

bible to persuade me there is a god

but there are great stories there

if you enter them they will show you

something about yourself

that you would never find if you had to

stick to what you could prove

at its heart peter’s story is this

on the eve of his arrest jesus

tells peter the disciple who loves him

the most

that he will deny christ three times

before the rooster crows peter says

i couldn’t do that

but then he does peter

denies christ three times

peter does what he did not think he

could

ever do

the normal way that you hear this story

is it’s about

the way peter gave into his fear

but i don’t think that’s the point of

the story

i denied everything in me

right up to that moment that would have

said

stop

and i did it because my mother asked me

so breathe my life into peter’s story

what if jesus isn’t making a prediction

but he’s giving an instruction

peter you who love me most

you will deny me three times

this is what has to happen

this is your sacrifice

peter weeps when his work is done

just as i wept when i let go of

everything i had held back

in order to do what my mother had asked

my mother died easeful with her choices

and her life as i had ever seen her

still if i could talk to her

i would say i’m happy for her

and then i’d ask her forgive me

when peter meets the resurrected christ

he too asks for forgiveness

jesus asks peter do you love me

peter says yes jesus says nothing

there is nothing to forgive

at my mother’s bedside two commands

collided

that i could not reconcile

do not be part of my mother’s death

respect my mother’s request to have me

help her die

and in that moment i sat silent i was

true to myself and betrayed myself

at exactly the same time

for three years i could not mourn my

mother’s death

without telling myself i let someone

kill her

peter’s story tells me this

there are things in this life you will

never be able to reason through

i hadn’t seen it before

but i see this now

in the face of my mother’s approaching

death

i stayed

i did not abandon her i did the only

thing i could do

purely out of love without thinking of

myself

i gave love all that love asked

and in doing that i found a greater love

than i had ever known before