Thread by @dianaberrent

A 🧵 on death (not Covid related)...

I’m sitting in a hospice room on death watch waiting for my mother to take her last breath. That said, I have a few thoughts about death that I want to share. And, trigger warning, it won’t be easy to hear… but we can do hard things.
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My mother is almost 82 and is over 2 years into a stage 4 cancer diagnosis with a 6-9 month life expectancy.
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Given the odds, we chose no treatment. It was the right choice – the opportunity to live her remaining days w/out medical procedures, constant drs appts and treatment (she went through it w/ previous bouts of cancer at 39 & 49) that would have wrecked her from day 1.
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Six weeks ago, as she became more and more uncomfortable, she decided that it was her time to die. She has always been extremely vain (who isn’t?) and didn’t want to experience the indignity of seeing how her last days would unfold.
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NY has no Death with Dignity law so we did our due diligence, filled out all the appropriate paperwork & met with bioethicists who informed us that starving herself to death was the only legal way to end your life in NY and the 42 other states that also provide no such laws.
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So 6 weeks ago, still of sound mind and body, but not wanting to see the gruesome nature of how the last days would unfold she decided to stop eating and drinking. I packed up some clothes and drove from my new house in DC to my childhood home in NYC. I’ve been here since.
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The first two weeks were almost a living wake, people taking turns visiting while she would obsess over what to serve – all while not eating or drinking a thing. It was actually kind of lovely.
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I should also mention that my mother and I have had a historically contentious relationship that met no great “closure” at the end and there was as much fighting and nasty words exchanged during these weeks as there ever was.
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Three weeks in she was still vacuuming and polishing the silver. Four weeks in she decided to take it a step further, increasingly frustrated at the time it was taking to die.
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She gathered all the available meds she had at her disposal (this is someone who recovered from surgery for a shattered knee with regular Tylenol, eschewing the extra-strength variety).
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She scrounged up enough pills from unusued prescriptions written through the years to take her own life - it didn’t work.

She then tried to overdose on morphine, again a failure.
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She got weaker, her body clinging on to life with a kind of ferocity that betrayed her every conscious wish.
Eventually things were so out of control we rushed her to the ER in the middle of the night early last week.
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(I’ll skip over the part where the EMT’s who showed up weren’t vaccinated). Or the staff at the hospital who refused to mask.
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It’s been almost six weeks since this all began and I am sitting here in the middle of a severe weather watch in NYC, at her side – having snuck in a bottle of wine to calm my own nerves – waiting for her to take her last breath.
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So… despite all efforts made over a two year period she is dying the exact death she feared. Not in her home (home hospice fired her on the spot for suicide ideation… not their fault but don’t get me started). Emaciated. Undignified. A living corpse.
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I understand death is a tricky issue to discuss but let’s face it… no one gets out alive.

But during this brutal time I have seen friend’s dogs and cats die; each was afforded love, comfort, affection, safety and a graceful end.
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That is also what we should demand for the terminally ill. Death with Dignity should not be a luxury but a right. I challenge every state legislature to pass bills like ones that exist in Oregon and elsewhere.
cc: @GovKathyHochul
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How you die, just like how you are born, should not depend on your zip code. If we cannot afford the same kind of dignity at death as we offer our pets we are doing it wrong.
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Pass #DeathwithDignity laws throughout the nation… stand up and demand it.

Death will befall us all – make sure that when it comes your time you have the control of how you leave this earth. It is the greatest gift we can give the (nearly) departed.
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This is how I would like her remembered:

Looking hot as hell with my Dad (gone 21 years now) in 1963… in a bikini and in love.

/end