Book looks at question of a peaceful death

Press, 11 May 1981, Page 16

Book looks at question of a peaceful death

By

ALAN RUSBRIDGER

in “The Guardian,” London

In a book shortly to be published privately in America a middle-aged woman describes in painful detail how she planned to help her 83-year-old dying mother to die gracefully and peacefully but ended up suffocating her with a plastic bag. “I thought her breathing would just go down and finally she would just sigh,” she says in the book. “Instead her body fought for breath. It was just horrible. My worst agony afterwards was that she had been aware. Now, I think not, because she was able to use her hands if she wanted to, but she. never did once.”

The passage comes from “Let Me Die Before I Wake,” by Derek Humphry, which is about to be brought out by Hemlock, one of the American organisations campaigning for the right of. terminally ill people to end their own lives in a planned manner. By the time it is published it will be one of four publications containing instructions on how to commit suicide, or to help someone else do so. Two the Scottish and Dutch versionshave already appeared. EXIT, the English euthanasia organisation plans to, bring out its Deliverance, ’ shortly- , , You could browse through Derek Humphry’s book for So time before 11,15 S tore £“S fuss about. The first six TanteS are simply the moychapiers “i r eop j e m oSfes «*0 ere ’.L, P to die on their own gSHfe* means used are

included, but almost as incidental details.

Some of them — such as the woman who ended up suffocating her mother — are sad examples of how not to do it and provide the raison d’etre for the euthanasia movement and for the booklets that are being published, often in the face of considerable opposition and legal threats. “I want to contribute to your book because I don’t want anybody else to have to go through that,” the woman told Derek Humphry. “I don’t want the person dying to go through it and I don’t want the. person helping to go through it. “This society makes it so difficult to even approach this kind of thing that I can’t find it in my heart to condemn myself. The society and the system have made it so insane. One of the problems is that information is not accessible.

“I am not sorry I went through with it. I would do it again, even if things went wrong again, because I think even though she suffered horribly I probably spared her quite a long time of suffering.” Another, even more pathetic story, tells of a 55-year-old former marine driven to a nervous breakdown by caring for his mother as her health rapidly declined in a series of seedy, overpriced convalescent homes. None of the doctors, attorneys, or nurses he turned to for advice would help and in desperation he shot her. “I had no other choice but to kill my mother unless I wanted to disintegrate to where I went out and became a basket case,’* he saySTin the book. “It’s not

guilt I feel, or else I couldn’t continue living. It’s a terrible act. What more can you ask of a person than that they kill someone they love, or even assist?

Derek Humphry says he included the story “not to condone or condemn the actions of any of the individuals, but to help all of us better to understand the complexity of deci-sion-making in the process of dying, as well as the legal and medical obstacles inherent in such a situation.” “Most of all, the story tells us of the misjudgments made by individuals reduced to such desperate action because they had no one to guide or counsel them.” Not all the case histories are so grim — there is, for instance, Derek Humphry’s own tender story of how he helped his wife, Jean, die peacefully in the final stages of cancer. Others, like him, were able to turn to sympathetic doctors for advice and drugs, but even that could only go some way to lessening the ordeal involved for both invalid and family. What is apparent from all four publications is that there is no' such thing as an easy death. “Euthanasia” means a good death, rather than one free from pain or grief and nobody who has read the booklets could imagine that they present a recipe for a simple way out. The justification for the books is neatly stated in Arthur Koestler’s introduction ■ to the EXIT booklet: “There is only one prospect'worse than being chained to an intolerable existence: the' nightmare of a botched attempt to end it.”