Smith: Assisted suicide a humane final option for those who choose it

The path 29-year-old Brittany Maynard intends to take to her death 20 days from now is not one I believe I would, or could, follow.

It’s tough to think about. But I imagine that were I terminally ill and failing, I’d most likely ride it out, striving to derive or produce something good through each of my dying days.

Yet I couldn’t be more gratified that Maynard, the former San Franciscan who married in Sonoma Valley in 2012, will be allowed by the state of Oregon to end her painful withering with a lethal dose of prescribed pills. It’s clearly past time for a compassionate coming-about in California and the 44 other states that currently prohibit doctor-assisted suicide for people who are dying and seek to conclude life on their own terms.

I know nothing more about Maynard than what I’ve read, but I sense she’s the driven, potent, take-charge sort of person that my Aunt Esther and my colleague and friend Carolyn Lund were.

May I tell you, or remind you, about their lives and their deaths?

A LONGTIME REPORTER for the PD, Carolyn was a statuesque and commanding though wonderfully caring person, a widowed mother of three. She retired in 1992 and moved to Oregon.

She was four years into active retirement when she learned she had breast cancer. Amid aggressive treatment, she joined the campaign that in 1997 won enactment of the country’s first Death with Dignity Act, allowing terminally ill Oregonians to apply to receive and self-administer lethal medication.

Despite the surgery and chemotherapy, the cancer spread to Carolyn’s liver, then to her brain. She was becoming debilitated when she decided she would seek to end her life.

Her oncologist and her children tried to dissuade her, but Carolyn was resolute. Two doctors came to agree that she met the criteria of the Oregon law and should receive her requested prescription for 90 doses of a barbiturate. Her children accepted her wishes.

“I’m dying,” Carolyn, 66, told me by phone on Feb. 27, 2001. By then confined to bed, she was determined not to subject herself and her family to the terminal wasting that would precede death without intervention.

“I want to die peaceably and in the presence of my loved ones and in an orderly fashion,” Carolyn said.

Four days later, her favorite opera played on the stereo as she said her goodbyes to her grown children, her oncology doctor, her caregiver, her brother and three friends. She drank the glass of cranberry juice into which her own hand had stirred the prescribed barbiturates.

Carolyn slipped into sleep, but she didn’t die until nearly 38 hours later, far longer than what is usual. Still, she’d never came to and one of her daughters said afterward, “She died very peacefully, and that’s what she wanted.”

Through the first 16 years of the Oregon law, 1,173 terminally ill people were approved to receive lethal prescriptions. Carolyn was one of the 752 - 64 percent - who went through with ingesting them. That’s an average of 45 doctor-assisted suicides per year for the entire state of Oregon.

MY AUNT ESTHER, a fastidious, go-getting Type A, didn’t know what to do as she was losing herself to terminal cancer in her 70s. Determined not to die by degree, she drove one day in 1998 from her Southern California apartment to her neighborhood service station.

She took along a new gasoline can. Her mechanic asked why in the world she needed a gallon of gas; she said it was for a friend.

Having secretly wrapped up her affairs, my widowed aunt parked her spotless Toyota in an out-of-the-way place, doused the backseat with the gas and ignited it.

With the windows rolled up, the flames quickly died upon sucking the oxygen from the car and Aunt Esther. She was in bad shape when she was found nearly 24 hours later.

But, barely burned, she recovered. Then, in a hospital bed, she died the slow and dependent death she dreaded.

Very few people will qualify for, or choose, or keep to the course that Brittany Maynard is taking. But no humane state should block their way.

Chris Smith is at 707-521-5211 and chris.smith@pressdemocrat.com.