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