Lucky Enough

Lucky Enough

Margaret and Me

I began my recent eulogy for my mother with these words. “My mother, an inveterate estate sale maven, once found a little pillow for me that says ‘If you are lucky enough to have a house on a lake, you’re lucky enough.’ I’m lucky enough.

I’ve been thinking about that in terms of my mother’s recent death, deciding that if you’re lucky enough to have your mother live vibrantly to the age of 101— you’re lucky enough.” Again, I was that lucky, but the story behind the end of that long life was not simple.

As long as I can remember in my adult life, my mother, a fiercely independent, disciplined person of habit, informed her four children that when she no longer could live life the way she wanted to – read: on her own terms– she wanted out.  She was a charter member of the Hemlock Society, which changed names several times while advising its members how to legally end their lives. 

My mother’s disciplined lifestyle, fortunate circumstances, and fabulous genetics kept her healthy and able to live on her own comfortably through her 10^th decade.  She accommodated to the indignities of aging only enough to enable her to participate in her French and Spanish clubs, her dinner dates with the gentlemen callers she cultivated after my father died, the family time with nearby children and the younger friends who remained in her social sphere.

Even so, in the last several years her decline weighed on her.  She began to greet me on my weekly visits and daily phone calls with a repetition of the messages “This is no way to live.”  “I go to sleep each night praying that I don’t wake up in the morning.” All the while, she continued to drive to her boyfriend’s apartment, bringing the dinners I cooked or leftovers from a restaurant meal two or three times a week, went to her clubs, saw my  nearby sister at least two or three times a week, and managed her household, even when she reluctantly agreed to have daily help.

Then came the car accident. My mother was an excellent driver (and an airplane pilot) but though she self-regulated by reducing her driving to very local trips to my sister’s, the grocery store, and her boyfriend, a week prior to her 101^st birthday, less than a mile from her house, she crossed lanes into oncoming traffic, causing a serious accident, in which she sustained a minor fracture in her leg, and more serious wounds in both her legs, an arm, and on her face.

During her week-long hospitalization, involving rehabilitation, wound care, and discussion of next steps for her, my mother listened to the doctors, asked for medical advice from my physician brother and husband, and despite her failing short-term memory and the effects of pain medications, made a clear decision not to go to a step-down rehab facility for intensive PT and OT therapy, but to go home with round the clock caregiving and at-home therapies. We scrambled to provide those services, including hospice services which she qualified for because she lost so much weight after the accident.

Then came a month during which my mother orchestrated her exit from this life. There’s no other way to describe it. With her characteristic determination, dignity, and persistence, she gathered those that meant the most to her (her children and grandchildren), and the hospice professionals and her caretakers, and explained that her debilitated state was not sustainable for her.  Her extensive wounds and leg fracture left her unable to stand or walk unaided.  Moving to a commode to relieve herself was a painful ordeal, and she relented to wearing incontinence briefs. She had devoted caretakers, and for a short time, she worked to restore her independence through physical therapy. When she realized the most she would be able to improve was to transfer with assistance to a wheel chair, she made up her mind.

She was weakened, though entirely competent to make a decision to stop eating and drinking.  She asked for medical advice on what that process would entail, explained to the people who didn’t understand the depth of her certainty why she needed to do this, and then…. she did it.

Over six days, she resolutely neither ate nor drank. We told her stories, and we sang. Initially, she joined in, then just listened, then slept, and finally slipped into a next world that she wasn’t sure she believed in. She poignantly said if there was such a world, she looked forward to seeing her father and mine.

Honoring her wishes was a sacred, if terrible honor. She ended her life the way she lived it —with self-determination and dignity.  At 101, she was lucky enough….and so were we.