WA’s ‘Death with Dignity’ law failed my wife

My beloved wife of 27 years had to die alone.

It shouldn’t have been that way. We both wanted Toni’s suffering to end with her dying peacefully in my arms, but Washington state’s supposedly enlightened “Death with Dignity” law wouldn’t let her. 

Despite first-class medical care, her disease, one of the many variants of ALS, was slowly grinding her down.

Toni’s primary identity was not as an attorney, wife or prankster nonpareil, but as a distance runner. She enthusiastically, and sometimes doggedly, ran every day for 30 years, missing only a couple of days due to the flu. So it was brutally ironic that the first thing the disease took was her legs’ ability to support her.

We knew what lay ahead. Her brother had recently died of the same disease, and she didn’t want a repeat of the prolonged misery that he and his family endured.

Our current law says that to get aid in dying a patient must have a diagnosis of natural death within six months. But because her disease was slow and inexorable, it would mean more years of suffering before she could qualify for medically aided death.  

Finally, after about eight years of decline, the force and bewildering variety of her symptoms overwhelmed her uncommon ability to extract every last drop of fun out of living. Her effervescence still shined on occasion, but less and less. We knew that Wild Thing (my pet name for her) would have to figure out how to end it all.

And not merely how to do it. Because she didn’t qualify for medical aid in dying, she would have to do it alone.

I hate this fact.

It’s bad enough that nature deprived us of an expected 25 more years of love, but it breaks my heart that our poorly formulated laws prevented me, and everyone else, from giving her aid and comfort during the planning and carrying it out. If it appeared that I had assisted in any way, I would be in legal jeopardy.

In recent years we talked about everything except how and when she would die. For my protection, she wouldn’t let me know the specifics. All I knew was that in a year or three she would end her life somehow, at some time.

I now know that with information from an aid-in-dying organization she was able to select a method and buy the materials. Aware of the dangers of botching the job, she even sent a sample of the chemical to a lab to confirm that it was the right stuff.

But how does a person decide when the pain is persistent enough, when the happiness is rare enough, to actually do it? The story of the frog in slowly heating water comes to mind. If anybody could resolve to do it without discussing plans with anyone, and then accomplish it, it would be Toni.

I am fiercely proud of her bravery and force of will.

But I’m also angry because we, as citizens in charge of our laws, have badly failed her and many others. We need to improve these laws as Canada’s Parliament did in 2016.

We should drop the six-month requirement and keep the requirements that a patient have a grievous and irremediable medical condition, an advanced state of decline and unbearable suffering from the illness. And we should keep the more general safeguards regarding the patient’s age, mental health, informed consent, unacceptable motives, pressure from family or others, et cetera.

If Washington had such law, we and our loved ones would have come together for a wonderful and tearful goodbye, rather than attend a memorial service. And Toni’s last moments would have been in my warm, loving embrace.