I originally posted this as part of a thread on The Right to - TopicsExpress



          

I originally posted this as part of a thread on The Right to Choose Your Death, or Dying with Dignity. I want to share it here, not to garner sympathy, but because there are other writers here and by sharing my experiences maybe I can help you capture some of this emotion or experience in your writing. My mother died of Cancer. We kept her home until the end. She chose to let the illness take her naturally but were in Canada. We could afford to try different treatments and we could afford medication to help with the pain and the nausea. If we had been in the US the private insurance alone would not have been enough and we may have made a different choice. With my mother, she chose to try every treatment because theres always that little chance that something will buy you an extra year or two. An extra two years would have given her the chance to see her third grandchild. We werent that lucky, the treatments only bought her a few months. But it was her choice to lose her hair and be sick all the time while on Chemo. She could have stopped at any time and we would have helped her. Cancer is not pretty. She couldnt climb stairs so she could no longer sleep in the same bed as my dad. She threw up everything she ate into an old ice-cream pail she kept beside her chair. She lost her hair. She lost 25 pounds. By the end she couldnt remember what day it was, or where she was. Even clean sheets made her skin itch. She couldnt get out of bed without someone there pull her to sitting and then pull her to standing and then act as a human walker. My dad got next to no sleep for a week. I cried myself to sleep most nights. My son didnt understand why he couldnt play with his toys in the living room (she slept a lot and needed quiet and her room was right next to the living room). But if anyone tells me that she didnt die with dignity, well, they just dont understand. My mother let go peacefully, she died at home, and even when she was throwing up everything and demanding quiet we never saw her as a burden, she never lost her dignity, her personhood, not until she left us completely.
Posted on: Thu, 09 Oct 2014 12:55:37 +0000

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