One
March night I'll never forget, my wife grasped my hand, and looking
up from her hospital bed, her eyes locked on mine, she begged me to
sneak her pain meds from home. Tired of living with bone-numbing
pain, she wanted to overdose on pain medication, so she could finally
die in peace.
It was heart
wrenching, her sad eyes looking up at me, pleading. But I told her
no. Then explained, as calmly as I could, that it wouldn't be good
for our daughter to have one parent dead and the other in prison.
Before she died this past July, my wife and I were blessed to live
for 30 years our own goofy, old-movies, cheap-date life. She was one
of the sweetest, most loving and giving people I've ever known.
She
certainly didn't deserve to suffer as she did her last six months –
to endure eight ER visits, to be passed around like a hot potato by
three different hospitals, two skilled nursing facilities, two
long-term acute care hospitals, one rehab hospital – then to
finally, end up in hospice.
Take
it from me, there's nothing at all edifying about suffering and
certainly nothing edifying about watching the person you love most in
the world suffer day in and day out for months on end.
I
refuse to put a cherry on top of it. My wife's last six months were a
living hell. She bore the full brunt of a confluence of medical
issues – chronic pain, a neurological disorder, an auto-immune
disease, and inflammatory arthritis. In April her pain specialist
straight-up admitted the strong narcotics he'd prescribed hadn't even
come close to controlling her pain.
The
truth is, if my wife had had access to physician-assisted suicide,
she'd have used it without hesitation. As early as February, she told
me that she believed that death was now a better option than the
agony she lived with every day.
My
wife was clearly at peace with ending her life, but in our home state
of Texas, physician-assisted suicide was never an option. Partly, I
blame the religious right's perverse and unscriptural indifference to
the suffering of others, but I also blame the tyranny of the
able-bodied, living forever in denial about death.
When
most people imagine death at all, they envision it will occur some
time in the far, far future when they'll be surrounded, like some
Norman Rockwell painting, by all their loved ones at home. But the
truth is none of us knows when we will die or under what
circumstances. Many, if not most of us, will die in some kind of
hospital setting with tubes and electrodes stuck all over us.
Yet
I want someone to explain to me how is it right that if we have a pet
that was as racked by pain as my wife was for months on end, I'd be
considered cruel if I didn't bring it to the vet to be put down, but
humans, no? They must suffer and suffer like my wife, who writhed in
gut-wrenching pain nearly every one of her last 175 days.
Belgium
and Holland have physician-assisted suicide, as does Oregon, Montana,
Vermont, Washington, and now, California. In fact, across the
country, public opinion is swinging in the direction of
physician-assisted suicide. According to Gallup, almost 70% of
Americans now support it.
But
sadly, it is too late for my wife. I can never change the horror,
the almost-constant terror of her last six months; though, believe
me, every day I wish I could. But just maybe if more states opt for
physician-assisted suicide some body else's loved one won't have to
suffer in the future, as my wife did.
