“I can’t do that, darling. It’ll be murder. I can’t give you something that will kill you. We read about that all the time. These people can be prosecuted,” I say, although I don’t really think that a white woman my age will be sent to do hard time for assisting her husband in ending his life, in Connecticut, the Land of Steady Habits, as Brian often calls it.
“I could go to jail. To jail.”
Brian thinks this over and seems to drift away and then he comes back, with enthusiasm.
“You’d do great in jail. You’re so resourceful; you’re a leader. You’d be great.”
I tell him that I won’t do that and that whatever we do, it has to be his hand that guides the end. He falls asleep. In the depth of Google wormholes for end of life, for suicide, for assisted suicide, for euthanasia, for terminal illness, and for making end-of-life choices, in August I finally find Dignitas, a Swiss organization to which even a foreigner can apply for an accompanied suicide, if you meet their criteria: be of sound mind, have medical records supporting this, have ten thousand dollars to commit, and be sufficiently mobile to get to the outskirts of Zurich. I am already imagining how we can get to Zurich, and I cannot really imagine how we （mostly me, with no medical training and limited hand-eye coordination） will do this at home if Dignitas doesn’t work out. （They emphasize the words application and provisional, many times.）
Right to Die
Right to die in America is about as meaningful as the right to eat or the right to decent housing; you’ve got the right, but it doesn’t mean you’re going to get the goods. After Brian told me his decision, I’d called End of Life Choices New York, where my daughter knew a woman who knew a woman. Their mission is “to expand choice at the end of life, respecting every individual’s wishes, and striving for the best possible quality of life and a peaceful death.” On their website, it says that they also strive to educate people about end-of-life choices. They have been able to accomplish making it legal in New York to at least tell dying people about palliative and hospice care, and they managed to get a law passed in 2011 that asserts that these people have the right to know about the care available to them. They educate, they advocate, they pursue, and, perhaps most effectively, they counsel.
I called the excellent and haimish clinical director, Dr. Judith Schwartz, to talk about the organization, but first she had to counsel me, since I burst into tears as soon as she answered the phone. She advised me right away about what she—and the organization—could and couldn’t do. They do policy, they fight to expand the right-to-die laws so that you do not have to be in the final stages of a terminal illness to receive aid and medical assistance, and they attempt to ensure that, at the very least, your spouse or friend will not face prosecution if they do assist you in ending your life. （“Unsupervised two-year probation” is often what the widow who holds the gun or pours the poison winds up with, but that’s after an arrest, legal wrangling, and headlines in your local newspaper.）
Dr. Schwartz says, “When any kind of right-to-die legislation is proposed—the opposition shows up with ten million dollars as soon as it’s about your right to choose.”
End of Life Choices New York supports VSED—voluntary suspension of eating and drinking—as the only effective, legal, and certain end to life that even a very physically limited person can choose. It sounds to me like it takes enormous discipline and fortitude for everyone. I had a friend, years ago, who sat by the bedside of a dear friend, holding her hand every day for weeks. She said it was peaceful at first and then excruciating and then over. It seemed to me that my friend was a better, and also just different, person afterward.
“It’s not easy,” Dr. Schwartz says.
I say, “It takes a couple of weeks, I know.”
There’s a pause.
“How big’s your husband?” she asks, and I can tell her exactly because, thanks to an eating-disordered adolescence of football and wrestling, Brian announces every change in his weight like a supermodel. “He’s six foot one, two fifteen.” （When he got the diagnosis, he dropped ten pounds in a minute. When he finished the application to Dignitas, he gained it all back and ate like a man on a mission and was, as always, happy to share, happy to order more, happy to meet the chef.）
And Judith Schwartz says, “Oh. Could be three weeks, even a week more.” She says kindly, “It is not an easy process, often.”
From which I take that often means ever, just as rarely, in all of my conversations now, means fucking never. She lets me know, because I ask twice, that her organization does nothing at all in the hands-on department.
“Oh, no,” she says immediately but still warmly. I love Judith Schwartz as I now love everyone I speak to who is not cruel, horrified, or utterly useless in this process.
I ask what she has heard about Dignitas.
“Oh, yeah, they are the real deal,” she says, and I am reassured once more that they are not scam artists （although in May 2018, BBC News reported that an ex-employee accused Mr. Minelli, the director, of receiving bequests from rich and more or less satisfied and grateful families of the dead. Who can blame them? To have your beloved relative find a way to painlessly end a life of suffering or of painful diminishment or of just plain exhaustion at one hundred four, like David Goodall, the ecologist and botanist, who said, “My abilities have been in decline over the past year or two, my eyesight over the past six years. I no longer want life to continue. I’m happy to have the chance…to end it”）。
I have now read everything, pro and con, about Dignitas and seen most of the documentaries. Dignitas seems to do what it says it does: You fill out the forms, write the essays （a biography and a few paragraphs on why you wish to have “an accompanied suicide”）， and send them—eventually—ten thousand dollars （more for the cremation and the mailing of the ashes in a plain urn if that’s what you want, is what I recall） and a pile of documents. You show up in Zurich and they interview you, twice （it used to be only once, but someone complained that more assessment was required, and I assume that that someone was connected to the Swiss government）， and you bring all sorts of identification, so it’s not a pain in the ass for the Swiss police to identify the body （which apparently had sometimes required a couple of calls to grieving Americans, once they got back home）。
“They’re Swiss,” Judith Schwartz says, laughing a little. “Here’s what they’re looking for: discernment. Discernment.” She says the word emphatically, as does the woman—friend of a friend—who brought her father to Dignitas last year and has become my coach for the final-days part of the process—as if it’s a word with special meaning, which it may be to the Swiss people, or to Dignitas. “Discern-ment,” she says. “You really have to be cognitively with it. That’s what they’re looking for and checking for. They absolutely will not accept anyone who cannot clearly make this choice, with full comprehension and understanding, from beginning to end.”
They now require the dental records of the person coming to Zurich, and I have to get them. I mention this to Dr. Schwartz, with an air of can-you-believe-it?