I never knew anyone who would soon die. Never saw the specter of death lingering ominously over someone, slowly and methodically subtracting life in small but highly visible amounts until all that was left was an unfamiliar rendering of someone once so familiar. When my stepfather Fred died – a once barrel-chested black soldier with a proud gait – he did so in solemn increments.

Each day, for weeks, he wilted and withered, falling inward like a flower deprived of light and water until eventually he was closed off to us forever. I flew home to Colorado on what I thought would be the eve of his death.

He’d been in the hospital for three painfully elongated years, tirelessly working to preserve kidneys that had gone mad. When I first saw him, he laid in somber repose, lingering in that liminal space between life and death, where he seemed to be drifting in a backward slow motion, receding from a life that had long been expiring.

When I brought my lips to his forehead, I felt the warmth of a fever that refused to abate and skin so taut from malnutrition it appeared as thin as the pages in a Bible. The feeding tube had long since been removed, a direct result of his decision to plot his own demise.

There had been hushed, spirited debates for weeks regarding his decision to discontinue dialysis. At a sickly 83-years-old, he didn’t consider refusing treatment and food, surrendering to the drama of it all. Admittedly, he was battle-weary, but his controversial choice to discontinue life-saving measures was a pronouncement made from a place of strength.



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He could have taken a more dramatic stance had he chosen to. Colorado is one of seven states with a Death and Dignity statute, which, in effect, gives terminally ill patients a right to end their incurable suffering. Montana affords physician assisted suicide but the courts must mandate it.

In all cases, patients must be terminally ill and have less than six months to live before an accredited doctor would administer a cocktail of drugs, hastening the patient’s death. In a 2013 Pew Research Poll, “66% of Americans say there are at least some situations in which a patient should be allowed to die. 57% percent say they would tell their doctors to stop treatment if they had an incurable disease and were totally dependent on someone else for their care.”

Ultimately, the right to die, to exercise complete control over one’s physical self, is as fundamental a right as free speech and worshipping whatever God you choose. Just like a woman’s womb is hers alone, a terminally ill patients should have complete autonomy over their bodies. Facing the reality of one’s own mortality isn’t a task for the weakest among us.

Nearly everything about America’s culture is based on our ability and desire to live as long as possible, to drive the hands of time in reverse. Death, even in the abstract, is a subject to be avoided, feared. There is no glory in it. As such, deciding to engineer one’s death, to, in effect, call upon it, is seen as a permanent moral and spiritual failure.



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Conversely, among African Americans, a spiritual group that prides itself on its resiliency, its ability to weather the most extreme suffering with minimal intervention and care, the issue of one’s right to die is markedly different than other groups.

The general consensus remains the same: if we could survive 300 years of slavery and another 100 years of Jim Crow there is no force of evil, no stage of cancer or degree of institutional racism that we cannot withstand with aplomb. So it’s not surprising that according to the Health Research Fund, “60% of blacks would prefer their doctors to do everything possible to save their lives if they knew they were suffering from an incurable illness.”

The right to choreograph the end of one’s life is a topic I’ve long considered. Having undergone two liver transplants and intestinal surgery before turning 28-years-old, I know well that there’s a degree of misery that you simply cannot outrun, when the pain feels an ocean wide and a soul deep, when every second is to be battled through. Life isn’t always a welcomed choice. I know what it means to look in on your life from the outside with unfamiliarity.

Later, after the small gravesite funeral, after the American flag was draped over his lacquered coffin and later folded and deferentially presented to my mother, she began to mourn in earnest. She’d stood sentry for years. She bathed him. She fed him. She changed his diapers. She cradled him like she had once cradled my sisters and I. All the things she’d done to usher in life as a young mother she was now, as a dutiful wife, doing in death.



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We didn’t stay long enough to watch as they lowered Fred into the cold ground. I suppose we still lamented our inability to throw death off course, hoping that if we bore down and willed it away, it would afford us additional birthdays and family holidays.

And while my feelings vacillated between grief, anger and acceptance, I knew that I needed to honor his wishes even if they were achingly finite. There is perhaps no greater gift than respecting someone’s wishes, in honoring their most heartbreaking choices, even when it hurts.



Kim Lute is a freelance journalist



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