Last year Terry Pratchett made a documentary about his Alzheimer’s Disease and his wish to die when he wanted to, meeting other people in the same situation, actually following some of them to their moment of dying. It was a powerful, emotional and honest documentary about a difficult subject.
Sandra had had much longer than Pratchett to make up her mind on this, having had to live with her disabilities for decades, living on a precarious edge where a small push could sent her towards complete helplessness. She had come to the same conviction as Pratchett had, that it was better to chose the time of her death even if this would out of necessity earlier than it medically needed to be, than keep on living without hope for progress.
When the side effects of our kidney transplant started to become chronic, especially after the first or second time she had slipped into coma this became her worst fear, that she would wait too long to die and it would slip out of her control, that she might end up phsyically alive but mentally destroyed.
She had always been a fighter though and she saw no reason just then to give up, though it was hard on her. There were also her sons to consider, the eldest of which was in trouble we need get into right now what she needed — and did — sort out from her hospital bed and of course there was me. She didn’t want to leave us, but she knew there would be a time she had to.
Watching that Pratchett documentary in June of last year crystalised a lot of these things for her, as it did for me and we had some long, serious talks about what and how we would handle it if she did come to a point of no return. At the time actually she had started doing better, she would be out of hospital not too long after, come home and for a while it looked we finally had all the support we needed, that she was finally stabilising and moving back to a “normal” life, before it all came crashing down again in September.
And this time she had made up her mind. She stopped treatment, said her goodbyes and died, a year and a week ago. She died as she lived, in as full a control of her own destiny as she could get.
She would’ve done the same without Pratchett’s documentary, but it did make it easier for her, for us, to go through with it. It’s one more thing I have to thank him for: thanks to him we met and fell in love and thanks to him she could die with dignity.
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