Gillian Bennett is pictured with with her cat, Cosmo, in 2013. Facing the onset of dementia, she took her own life because she didn't want to be a burden. Photo: Postmedia files/HO I can hardly look at that picture of Gillian Bennett, the B.C. woman who took her own life last month and left behind an un-self-pitying note, without bawling.
The picture was taken in 2013 and in it, Bennett, who had a great smile, was holding her cat, Cosmo. Though she was born in 1930, she looked her age in a lovely way and as though she had much to live for still.
But she was in the early stages of dementia, was determined to be a burden to no one, and chose to take a lethal dose of Nembutal, with her affairs in order and Jonathan, her husband of 57 years, at her side.
After her death, the website she set up — deadatnoon.com — became active, and thus, from the grave, did Bennett become the latest of those who advocate for physician-assisted suicide in the most dramatic fashion.
Good for her, too, I say.
But good, too, for the family my Postmedia News colleague Tom Blackwell wrote about Wednesday — the late Douglas DeGuerre and his daughter, Joy Wawrzyniak.
Wawrzyniak won a significant victory late last month at the Health Professions Appeal and Review Board, the Ontario tribunal which reviews decisions made by the College of Physicians and Surgeons.
The college had twice rejected Wawrzyniak’s complaint about two doctors at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre in Toronto, who had without telling her (and she was the “substitute decision maker” for her father) overridden the “full code” response she requested on her dad’s chart and imposed a do-not-resuscitate, or DNR, order.
She arrived at the hospital on Sept. 22, 2008, found her father in respiratory distress and begged in vain for someone to help him, but to no avail because of the DNR order from the doctors, who deemed such extreme measures “futile therapy.” DeGuerre died from cardiac arrest.
The cases surely illustrate the difficulties of so-called “end of life” care (Who makes the final decisions? What’s the point of having a substitute decision maker if their directions can be overridden?) but also the notion of dying with dignity, which is slowly but surely gaining traction as a sort of “right” to which we are all entitled and encouraged to exercise.
More troubling, as Globe and Mail columnist Konrad Yakabuski wrote last weekend, is the subtext that there’s only one way to die with dignity — Bennett’s studied way. “We come into this world helpless,” Yakabuski wrote, “… and traditionally, most of us have gone out of it that way.”
In other words, does anyone really believe that DeGuerre — he was 88, and had diabetes, end-stage kidney disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder and just a few days before had had both legs amputated above the knee — died with less dignity because he chose to rage against the dying of his particular light?
As his daughter told Blackwell, “He wanted the surgery (the amputations) because he wanted to live. My father was a fighter.”
Jonathan and Gillian Bennett in the early 1980s.
So were the two old people I knew best, my parents.
My dad, a longtime smoker, had lung cancer, surgery in which he lost much of one lung, and chemotherapy. (He had quit cigarettes about a decade before he got sick, an act I believe bought him most of those 10 years.) Afterward, he walked the long halls of their apartment to build his strength back up, did his breathing exercises religiously and was feeling victorious when we learned the cancer had spread to his brain.
Even then, he battled a while longer, until he didn’t, and then he died quickly and peacefully, in the manner that is now approved.
My mother, on the other hand, outlived him by 15 years.
She too had been a big-time smoker, though even she quit about a year before her death because by then she was tethered to a portable oxygen tank. (An alcoholic, she never did quit drinking, though she slowed down, her legendary capacity shot by age and illness.)
The last couple of years of her life were rotten: She weighed less than 100 pounds, had emphysema, couldn’t keep much down, and would become dangerously dehydrated if you even looked at her the wrong way, each time ending up in emerg with one of those heavy-duty machines forcing oxygen into her battered lungs.
But for a couple of outings a week with me, she was mostly confined to the apartment, her life shrinking before my eyes, if not her own.
On her last trip to hospital, she was misdiagnosed with C. difficile and so kept in isolation, and the last time I saw her, a doctor had just come in to also tell us she had colon cancer.
When he left the room, she grabbed my hand and asked, “It (the cancer diagnosis) won’t affect my quality of life, will it?” I assured it wouldn’t and shortly after, went home, telling her I’d see her the next morning.
She died that night.
She was a skeletal mess with the constitution of a horse and she wanted nothing more than to live, just one more hour, day, week. And, for the record, she died with all the dignity — ferocious and strange as she was — in the world.
cblatchford@postmedia.com
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