Twice, to my 16-year-old thinking, her life was saved. But when I grew up, I asked myself, saved for what? More misery, an increasingly bleak future with no hope for recovery? If I were in a similar position, would I want to be rescued?

Image Credit... Stuart Bradford

I can now understand the thinking of Betty Rollin’s mother, Ida, who, at 75, also had advanced ovarian cancer. As Ms. Rollin told it in “Last Wish” (Linden, 1985), Ida was a loving, funny, delightful human being. She was also a no-nonsense, take-charge person. So when Ida’s life had become a series of debilitating medical crises  “Every day is bad,” she said  she asked her daughter to help her end it.

“Mother,” Ms. Rollin responded, “is that really what you want  to die?”

“Of course I want to die,” Ida said. “Next to the happiness of my children, I want to die more than anything in the world.”

And so Ms. Rollin embarked on a quest to find out how her mother’s wish might be granted. It took courage and perseverance. But most of all, it took love, enormous love and respect for a woman who knew what she wanted “more than anything in the world.” With the right prescription finally amassed, Ida died peacefully by her own hand.

When very sick patients receive symptom-relieving medical, social and emotional support now provided by palliative and hospice care, few persist in wanting to die before nature takes its course. But even if such care had been available for Ida and my mother, it would not have restored either woman to a life she considered worth living.

Finding Dignity and Peace

Studies of dying patients who seek a hastened death have shown that their reasons often go beyond physical ones like intractable pain or emotional ones like feeling hopeless. Often the reasons are existential  recognition that their lives have lost all meaning, concern that they have become an undue burden to their loved ones, desire to avoid a protracted death or distress about the time and money being “wasted” in prolonging their lives, which are destined to end soon, anyway.

Dr. Timothy E. Quill of the University of Rochester School of Medicine says he believes that there is an occasional need for an assisted death. As he wrote in May 2004 in The New England Journal of Medicine:

“I recently helped my father to die. He was an engineer, independent, always on the go and in charge. He began to deteriorate rapidly from an ill-defined dementing illness, and his confusion and intermittent agitation did not respond to the standard treatments that were tried. He had made his wishes clear about avoiding any prolongation of his dying, but now he had lost the capacity to make decisions for himself.