Waiting...

[watervole]

I can't take much more of this. I can't concentrate. My sense of balance is off (I feel wobbly when I walk). It's a horrible kind of limbo.

How can I grieve properly when she isn't dead yet? But at the same time, I grieve every day and there's no end to it. Everything is stretched out.

While she had quality of life, it made sense. Even when she could only sit in a wheelchair in the hospice garden and watch her children play, it made sense. But what is the point of prolonging life beyond that point?

There comes a point where it feels more like cruelty than kindness. I felt the same way when my father-in-law was dying. His life was prolonged past the point where he himself would have chosen to die (his words). What was the point of forcing him to carry on through pain, through loss of quality of life and to subject his wife to having to care for a man who no longer recognised her?

When it comes to my turn, as it inevitably will some day - will I have the right to die at a time of my own choosing?

The next time I update my will (which I need to do soon anyway) I shall ask to have a living will drafted at the same time. I've been a believer in voluntary euthanasia for over a decade, it's time I got my personal wishes down on paper. I only hope that some day living wills will have legal standing and that other people's religious beliefs regarding suicide will not be allowed to over-ride my personal beliefs about being able to die with dignity.

Comments

[yonmei.livejournal.com]

I was so grateful, in the end, that my great-aunt (who I loved like a grandmother) died in her own bed, in her own home, the way she wanted it: she was getting to the point, in frailty and need for care, where someday soon - if she hadn't died - her GP would have said flatly that she must go into a nursing home where she could have round-the-clock care. She didn't want that. She told me emphatically she didn't want it, and that she trusted me to put a stop to it if she were herself unable to protest or prevent it.

Her quality of life had, to an external observer (well, to me) gone some time earlier. She loved to read, and her eyesight had gone. She loved to walk, and she couldn't leave the house except in a wheelchair. She loved to feed people, and she couldn't cook or even lay a table and put out boughten biscuits and cake. She loved to talk, and her lack of short-term memory was making conversations difficult. But she wanted to live - even if I couldn't see why, I knew she did, and I wanted it for her.

Even though I was conscious, even through the grief/pain/mourning, of relief when she finally died. So many people said to me, in the week or so after she died, that it was "a blessing" that I finally rang up a close friend in order to snarl at her "it's not a blessing! I just want her back!" and, bless her, she knew exactly what I meant, even though she also knew, as I did, that I didn't want her back the way she'd been the months before she died - not her sake, not for mine. (I didn't mind, though, when my other grandmother, told how my great-aunt had died, said "Ah - so God was good to her" which made sense in an odd mixed up kind of way.)

I wanted my great-aunt to live, and I wanted her to die, and I mourned her bitterly when she died, and I still miss her, and yet I am relieved and grateful that she died when she did, as she wanted.

None of this probably helps - I can't imagine what you're going through losing your sister, dying in the middle of her life like this. But I do know mourning is worse when it starts happening before someone dies: I managed to avoid thinking about it, years ago, when a friend was dying with AIDS: I just kept on hoping he would live, almost until the very end.

[lexin.livejournal.com]

I wanted my great-aunt to live, and I wanted her to die, and I mourned her bitterly when she died, and I still miss her, and yet I am relieved and grateful that she died when she did, as she wanted.

I know what you mean: I still miss my father terribly, but I could not want the life he had towards the end, and I'm...not happy, but as happy as I can be that he had the death he wanted, as close to the time that he wanted and with the people that he wanted.

I'm thinking of you, Judith. You are not alone in this.