The Quality of Life

My mother was a very practical woman. She and my father had a living will long before it was a well-known method to make your end of life wishes known. She was a believer in keeping things and people working until it no longer made any sense. My father had two heart attacks before the final one that sent his consciousness reeling into the stratosphere (or wherever). She was the one who kept him going for the additional 30 years.

After he died, she went sensibly on with her life for another two decades. At the age of 80, she gave up living alone and moved in with my youngest sister's family. One of the reason's she did so was that she had been having a lot of trouble with her balance and with pain in her hip. She had hip replacement surgery and expected to be able to go back to an improved quality of life. That didn't happen.

For some reason, her new hip didn't respond the way it should have and she was plagued by severe pain for the rest of her life. Her surgeon offered a free "re-do", but she decided that she didn't want to go through additional surgery without the prospect of a better outcome than she already had. She tried several different pain medications, but the only one that brought her any relief was morphine. Her doctor tried to dissuade her.

"Mrs. L. Don't you understand that morphine is highly addicting? You could very easily become dependent on it. You don't want that, do you?"

Mom's reply was, "So what. I'm 80 years old. If I'm an 81 year old morphine addict, who cares?"

She got her morphine prescription and was able to resume some of her activities.

A few years later, morphine wasn't taking care of her pain as well as it had. Her doctor refused to increase the amount to what she would have required and she came to me with a difficult request. She had read about a book titled, "Final Exit" , that detailed methods of suicide for the terminally ill. She was not terminal, but she was concerned that her pain was robbing her of an acceptable quality of life. In addition, even though she had never been a smoker, she suffered from advanced respiratory disease and couldn't breathe properly without the constant aid of supplementary oxygen. She wanted me to get a copy of the book for her. As it turned out, that visit was the last we had.

As you can imagine, this was an extremely difficult request for me to act on, but I did purchase the book for her. She had given me so much and had asked so little in return, that I felt I couldn't refuse her in what was her hour of need. I was spared having to give it to her, because she died of a massive stroke about a week after we had talked.

Would I have given the book to her? I have no doubt that I would have. I knew my mother well enough to know that this wasn't a frivolous request. Constant pain had invaded her life and she was no longer able to enjoy the things that gave her pleasure. She was worn down and exhausted by pain and no longer felt that her life was meaningful. Her life was still very meaningful to me, but it wasn't my choice to make.

The photo is of the hill at the top of our property. She loved the view from our patio. 1/3 of Mom's ashes are scattered there. The sisters have disposed of the other 2/3's in a couple of other world locations. Mom did love to travel.