Have you given much consideration to the inevitable fact of your death? Just as I’m sure you are all aware, countless people die every minute of every hour of everyday. In the time it took you to read that sentence there’s no telling how many folks around the world died some way or another. As such, it’s only a matter of time until your own death occurs, but how often do you really stop to think about the circumstances of your death?
Please forgive the morbidity of this post, but I’ve been forced to face the fact of death today and so the subject lingers in my mind.
My boss’ mother is dying, you see, and while I don’t know the woman very well personally, I’m acutely aware of the anguish my boss is going through. To protect the innocent and for clarity’s sake I’m going to use pseudonyms from here on out. My boss, Mary, has been acting as a care-giver to her elderly mother, Maude, for over two years, but in the past two week’s Maude’s health deteriorated such that she was put in ICU, where she has been kept alive thanks to dialysis, a ventilator, and a feeding tube.
Maude had an Advance Health Care Directive in place, granting Mary the authority to make the decision to cease life support in the event Maude becomes wholly dependent upon artificial support and lacks the cognitive wherewithal to express her desire to end that artificial support. Okay, that’s all well and good, right? Except that in this situation Maude retained her cognitive function and, accordingly, she retained the right to make her own decision about continuing or ceasing life support.
So today, without the ability to speak, Maude indicated to her daughter, Mary, and her physicians, that she does not want to continue to live in her present state of artificial life support. An important point to note here is that Maude is a retired nurse, and so she knows full well what is happening to her, and what her fate will be with or without the life support. Maude conveyed her decision to end life support by signaling with her toes.
And so tomorrow all of life support will be removed, and Mary and Maude’s other family members will play the wretched game of waiting to see whether Maude will die relatively quickly due to an inability to breathe without a ventilator, or if she will die from renal failure without machines mimicking her kidney function. Either way, it will not be fun.
What’s the point of all this? The point is to remind my fellow bloggers that we’re all going to die someday. Most of us, if we’re chronic bloggers and therefore internet users, live in technologically advanced enough places that we will die in a hospital. That being the case, however, does not mean that your death will be pretty or pleasant. Nevertheless, I urge each and every one of you to prepare an Advance Health Care Directive so that you might at least have some say in the circumstances surrounding your death. Surely we all remember Terri Schiavo, and none of us wants to end up in that situation...
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