When my mother and I went through my grandmother’s possessions after she died last year, we found a piece of paper. The paper was crinkled and well-worn, as if it had been folded and unfolded a hundred times. On this paper, in shaky cursive, was every procedure my grandmother had gone through since she became ill in 2005. For 18 years, she had been poked and prodded in hospitals from the Mayo Clinic to the University of Michigan, enough procedures to create a laundry list of surgeries.
My grandmother had a saying that originated in her child-rearing days: “You get what you get, and you don’t pitch a fit.” In the beginning, this was the advice she gave toddlers to rein them in. In my adult life, this was the advice she gave me during challenging times. In her later years, this was the advice she gave herself as she attended her many appointments and procedures. Her life came at the cost of these appointments, and she accepted that. I never heard her complain about it — “You don’t pitch a fit.”
Last spring, my grandmother died from cancer at age 84. Her illnesses had finally surpassed the capacities of modern medicine.
She went into hospice when her health degraded to the point where we were unable to care for her in her home. That day, I made the commitment to visit her every single day. You need people to visit you when you’re in places like that, because a day sick and alone can make 24 hours feel like thrice that.
Every day, I traveled an hour and a half with my toddler and mother to see my grandmother in hospice. Have you ever tried to keep a two-year-old quiet in a hospice facility? We got side eyes from the staff who disapproved of this choice to bring my daughter. I had to bring her, because her name is Verity Doris, named after my grandmother Doris. And Verity Doris had only recently met Grandmother Doris, because COVID had kept us away since Verity’s birth.
Verity is named after Doris because of Doris’s enormous heart for children. More than anything, Doris loved children. The matriarch, she had a hand in raising more than two dozen members of our family. If you were ever looking for Doris, you’d find her with the children. This is why Verity shares her name, and why Verity needed to spend this brief, but treasured, time with Doris.
Doris spent 30 days in hospice before drawing her last breath after her body had — very slowly — completely shut down. She spent nearly two weeks in “the end,” and I watched this “end” unfold every single day. Every day was more painful than the last, for Doris and loved ones who witnessed her slow disappearance from life.
She inexorably lost the elements of life that allowed her to live with dignity. “Comfort measures” were unable to keep her physically or psychologically comfortable. Through most of this time, she was completely lucid, and completely aware of what was happening to her body.
For the last weeks of her life, she consistently expressed her wish to die. “Every night when I go to sleep,” she told me, “I pray that I won’t wake up.” Doris lost the capacity to live her life with dignity.
Her body disintegrated while her mind remained, and this combination resulted in torment and agony — for her and for those who loved her.
Would she have taken medication to expedite her exit from this world? I never asked and I don’t know. Would I take it? I also don’t know. I’m not dying and I can’t make decisions about that inevitability until I am there.
The End-of-Life Options Act (HF1930/SF1813) moving through the Minnesota Legislature would allow terminally ill patients with stories similar to my grandmother’s, with less than six months to live, the opportunity to choose when the elements of life — as they define them — are gone. It gives people the choice to self-administer medication to end their suffering. It allows people to have autonomy over their bodies, a universal human right according to the United Nations.
There are protections against misuse — two physicians must confirm the terminal diagnosis, and the patient must be deemed mentally competent by both physicians. This excludes patients with Alzheimer’s, or patients with any form of cognitive impairment. Worldwide, there are 300 million people who can access Medical Aid in Dying (MAID). In the US, there are 74 million people who have this option. In the ten states plus Washington, D.C., that have MAID laws, there have been zero instances of coercion or abuse of this procedure. Zero.
We can’t assume what we would do, or what someone else should or should not do, at the end of their lives. After all, as my grandmother Doris said, “You get what you get.” We won’t know what we get until the end.
Rachel Hall Beecroft is the communications director for World Without Genocide at Mitchell Hamline School of Law. World Without Genocide will hold a webinar, open to all, on Wednesday, March 27, called “Bodily Autonomy: From Reproduction to End-of-Life Options.” Register at: www.worldwithoutgenocide.org/autonomy
