“You die the way you live. I don’t want to be fearful.”
— William Shatner, on turning 93
BACK IN THE 1990s, I was an editor at California Lawyer, a monthly magazine delivered to the 40,000 attorneys in the state. I assigned and edited a piece looking at proposed assisted-dying legislation. It was a political, legal article and I felt that it needed more of a personal touch, so I wrote the following sidebar:
My father enjoyed life. He took pleasure in simple, leisurely activities: a light book, a good meal, a relaxing smoke. He smoked Old Gold Straights and then, when his doctor told him he had chronic emphysema, he switched to Carletons. For more than 60 years, he smoked two packs a day.
In March 1988 he had an acute attack that hospitalized him. Although he continued – for a year or two – to shop, to eat out, to see new movies with Hildy, his companion of twenty years, he started complaining and quipping, “I’d like to wake up one morning and be dead.”
He was hooked up to oxygen and did regular respiratory therapy; it was a struggle just to breathe. He was constantly anxious — over how he’d be able to breathe another breath — but he wasn’t ready to die. “How will Hildy manage without me?”
Then, in December 1993, he asked me to help him find lethal drugs. “I can’t stand it any longer. It’s time,” he confided. “I’ve saved up a hundred Xanax. Will that do it?” I went to meetings of the Hemlock Society. I was told by a doctor there that Xanax, the anxiety-reducing sleeping pill, would not do the trick. My dad might go to sleep, but he might wake up.
I asked my own internist to help. “If I personally knew your dad, I would put him on a morphine drip and, over time, increase the dosage. But he’s not my patient. He lives 500 miles away. I’m sorry.”
I asked a doctor friend of mine who had known my dad for decades. “I can’t,” she said. “It’s too risky for me. Why don’t you call a hospice?”
I called three different hospice associations; I asked two more doctors, two nurses with access to lethal drugs, and a veterinarian. No one would help.
I am an only child, and my father and I had an intimate, caring relationship. He was always the good father. I was always the good son. But I couldn’t help him obtain the Seconal, Darvon, Nembutal or any of the drugs he needed to end his own life. I couldn’t spoon-feed him sleeping pills crushed in applesauce and then tie a plastic bag over his head. I couldn’t buy a gun and shoot him. I just couldn’t.
Or maybe it’s just that I wouldn’t. I am still confused about my failure to help: Was it my inability to find lethal drugs? Or did I not want him to leave me? Or was it a sense that my father was not 100 percent committed to suicide? I suspect now that I was incapable of helping him then, in part, because of his own reluctance to help himself die.
In February 1994, after another emphysema attack, I visited him at the Encino Medical Center in Los Angeles. He lay in a hospital bed, all kinds of tubes going in and coming out of his small, frail body. He had enough strength to sip a milkshake now and then, to thank the nurses who bathed him, to smile when Hildy came to sit by his side. He couldn’t carry on a conversation, couldn’t sit up or roll over, couldn’t even concentrate enough to watch TV. Yet he clutched in his hand the remote control to the blank TV screen, and he wouldn’t let go.
I think my father wasn’t willing to abandon the life he knew — as sad, grueling and painful as it was — for the uncertainty of what might come after life. He was afraid of death.
He never returned home. Caring for him in his debilitated state would have been too much for Hildy, and he refused to come live with me in Northern California. He spent his last nine months at the Tarzana Rehabilitation Center, lying immobile in rooms with other dying men, trying so hard to deny reality.
There are 200 beds at Tarzana, most of them filled with very ill, very old people. I got to know some of them well. They had two basic requests – either “Take me home” or “I want to die. Help me.”
After he was at Tarzana for three months, he asked me again to find a doctor to help him “end it.” A local hospice provided the number of a “sympathetic” doctor. A week later this physician was at my father’s bedside trying to convince him to “think positive.” My dad outright asked him to prescribe lethal drugs.
“Are you a religious man?” asked the doctor.
“Why?” asked my dad.
“Don’t you believe that God wants you to live as long as you can?”
“God doesn’t give a shit about me.”
“You don’t think that God can help you?”
“I don’t know. I know that you can help me. You … know … what … I … mean?” My father stared at this doctor who had never met him before, who know that I was a journalist, an editor at California Lawyer, who was fearful, I believe, of the legal consequences of physician aid in dying.
“I do know what you mean. I’m sorry, but I can’t help you.”
Two weeks after his 85th birthday, my father passed away. The next day I went to the “convalescent” home to pick up his phone, his fan, his slippers, his robe. In his bed – already – was another old man. On my way out, down the long hallway, a guy I barely knew reached out to me and pleaded, “Help me.”
Thirty years later, I still wonder if I could have — if I should have — helped my father end his life. Next week: The head of Compassion & Choices discusses the laws and roadblocks to physician aid in dying
Really liked this one, Michael. I remember your dad. This is not a fun position to be in. For either of you.
Very sweet story. You did all you could. You can lay that burden down.