Excerpt from Pop (the story of caring for my dad)
Final Exit is published by the Hemlock Society. It’s a manual on how to kill yourself. Not big, but it’s a wild ride. I was reading it on a Grand Canyon river science trip I did a few years back, working for the company doing the Environmental Impact Statement on Glen Canyon Dam and how its operations affect the Grand Canyon. The book calmly discussed suicide, like how to cook a meatloaf. Some history, different ways people did it, some stories by people who decided to do it because of a painful or terminal illness. They justified it, and then they offed themselves. It took pains to suggest several of the least painful, fastest, most surefire ways. The preferred method was an OD of phenobarbital, backed up by a plastic bag over the head, tied at the neck. If you took the drugs, then taped the bag around your neck promptly (you had to do it yourself so nobody else could be accused of murder), you’d pass out from the drugs before you started getting scared or having trouble breathing. You’d then painlessly suffocate, even if you didn’t die of the drugs. Double redundancy. Piece of cake.
There was another guide on the trip named Whale. Big guy, kinda homely, heart of gold. His entire life was running boats down the Colorado in the Grand Canyon. I can relate. Hard to contemplate doing anything else for a living once you’ve done that. He was a Vietnam vet. Didn’t talk about it much. Didn’t talk much, anyway. Saw me reading the book around the campfire one night, asked about it. Then asked to borrow it. Had it read and gave it back to me in three days. I was reading it out of curiosity. I figured he was, too.
He shot himself in a local park not long afterwards. Guess the bag and drug thing was too complicated.
I spent many a night by my daddy’s bedside, pondering how to painlessly put him out of his misery. Him, there, peacefully snoring away after a long day of blood pressure cuffs, diabetes testing, showering, eating, pooping, changing clothes, taking medications, watching TV, shuffling around our house with his white cane tapping the right hand walls. I thought of that book. I thought about how to get away with it without getting caught.
There is an immense chasm between pondering an action at once terrible and absolutely final, and doing it. Few know that space in between. Fewer still would dare let themselves go there, or admit it to anyone, including themselves. I could’ve ended my own life far more easily. I sat by that bed, night after night, after the few good days, mostly after the surfeit of particularly bad ones, where I had to watch my daddy cry over his pathetic life, his lost love. Watch him watching himself slide into oblivion, no escape. It was weird. Here was a person sliding backwards into childhood, infancy. At least when you change a baby’s diapers, you know someday they’ll grow out of it. When a child needs help putting on their shoes or going potty, eventually, they figure it out. When they don’t understand something, you explain it to them, and sooner or later they get it. With dementia, the same sort of things happen, but in reverse. The body is bigger and smellier. They just get worse and worse, instead of the other way around. And all that with a person you’ve talked with, had a bond with, loved. They were Somebody. They had a Life. You Knew them. Cherished them. Depended on them being there. Now you grasp at tiny straws, then: gone.
In the end, after much grave contemplation, I just couldn’t do it. I had to admit to myself that he himself had told me he wanted to live as long as he could. All this thinking and planning was my own way of creating an escape. Not for him; for me. I needed a way out. An ending. A light at the end of. Spending that time, for me, in the darkness of night, next to my peacefully slumbering daddy, was weirdly like having him teach me, embrace me, advise and protect me. Thinking of these life-and-death things provided my escape from the stresses outside, brought me closer to him. His essence. The part of a parent a child rarely sees. Then, one night, I just got up, kissed him on his forehead, wished him sweet dreams, and never gave it another thought.
It wasn’t like Pop was in excruciating pain, or facing great and never-ending suffering. (At least not any more than the rest of us.) Dad had made his choice and made it clear, and I would honor it. If we went broke or crazy in the meantime, so be it. He was worth that much, anyway. He’d die when he was damned good and ready. He didn’t need me. And if there was a God, he was pretty fucking good at this sort of thing—too good, if you ask me.
