Life's Serendipity
because there are no "coincidences"
Still missing Lucky Ting, but glad that he is no longer suffering. And then I received an amazing letter from Compassion & Choices, the organization that promotes “care and choice at the end of life” for human beings. I truly believe in this cause as well, and urge others to research the laws in their own states. The fundraising letter was from Dan Diaz of Alamo, California, the husband of Brittany Maynard who moved to Oregon to exercise her right to die on her own terms back in November of 2014. Dan has been working with Compassion & Choices at Brittany’s request to expand this legal right, and within a year of her death the End of Life Option Act was signed into law in California.
The States with this right are listed in the letter as Oregon, California, Washington, Vermont, Maine, Montana, Colorado, New Jersey, Hawaii, and the District of Columbia. This leaves an awful lot of us without the right to choose to end our life if we have been diagnosed with an incurable illness. As Dan points out, having the law on the books gives the terminally ill the OPTION of choosing when to end their own suffering. Just like the right to choose an abortion, neither of these choices is forced on anyone against their will.
So on this Sunday that I was able to drive into the country and have a delicious lunch at the Vanilla Bean Cafe in Pomfret because it was cloudy enough for me to be able to see, I listened to Garrison Keillor reading his book That Time of Year on the car’s CD player. I don’t seem to be able to find a way to play CD’s in the house nowadays, although I am sure somewhere I have a player that would work. And I had a title search to do in Pomfret but now that most land records are on line, the drive was just a nostalgic Sunday tour. Driving around to all the town halls to check their records used to be one of the most fun parts of the job. But time and technology march on, and some of us can still cut the mustard so to speak even though we may have preferred to stay in the last century.
Katharine, thanks for the reflections on end-of-life care, a topic few of us want to think about until it is too late. Having recently watched my mother-in-law at age 101 studiously avoid the topic, I want something different for myself. On her last visit to the hospital, in what she described as severe pain, she exclaimed "this is happening because my doctors are neglecting me," as if she had the right to live forever pain free. I do wish a doctor had given her the option of "comfort care" and hospice earlier, before she slipped away into a near-comatose state the last six days of her life. Apparently many physicians do not feel comfortable doing that as long as the patient feels good enough to go out into the world. In my mo-in-law's case, she attended 2 cocktail parties, visited her trainer and her hair dresser the week before she fell ill. And then there is the mystery of Jimmy Carter, still in hospice after more than a year because, he says, "I can't figure out how to die." My mother-in-law did laugh at that quip. "I can't figure out how to die either," she said.