The Dominos

My mother, like maybe all mothers everywhere, is a difficult woman. Maybe that’s because being a mother is difficult.

Very difficult.

I’m a mother now, and I wonder if my children, once they are my age, will say the same about me. But difficult or not, I do love my mother. She brought me here, didn’t she? Here to experience this wonderful and complicated experience called life.

Last week, two of my friends’ mothers died. One on Monday and one on Wednesday. “They’re falling like dominos these days,” one of our friends commented on a group thread. “Yes. It’s that time,” responded another.

On Friday, I attended the Shiva for one of these women. It was truly more like a celebration of life than anything else. Almost a party. The caterers provided an elegant selection of passed hors d’oeuvre. A tiny ceramic spoon filled with polenta and topped with short ribs. A perfectly formed cube of crispy rice topped with spicy tuna and one teensy, yet artistically sliced flower of scallion. These little masterpieces made me feel old. Outdated. I can remember the time when a pig in a blanket was considered quite sophisticated.

Most of the people attending the Shiva were about my age, in their mid to late fifties and early sixties. The majority of Susan’s (the deceased) friends had passed long before she did, so there were only one or two of her old comrades there to bid her adieu. She was 95 when she died, which, crazy as that may seem to me (84 was a good run when I was young) is not that unusual these days. But the last four years of her life had been agony. For her and her loved ones. She suffered from chronic pain and dementia and an unidentified illness. “I just wish I could have done something for her,” her heartbroken son told me with tears in his eyes.

As my friend Georgia and I each took a roasted duck micro-crostini off a passing silver tray, she turned to me and said quite casually “yeah, we need to start planning our suicides now. Seriously. I am not putting my kids through this hell.”

Peter (a friend from childhood) who was standing with us and noshing on a crab cake topped with a spicy remoulade, said “Agreed, but we have at least twenty years before we have to start thinking about this.”

“That,” I assured him, “is absurdly presumptuous.”

“It is” Georgia chimed in. “We need to get all this settled while we are still of sound mind and body.”

As we milled about, chatting and watching the lovely slide show of Susan’s life, we began to talk about our parents and how their lives had ended. Some had dramatic tales. A beloved father who died at 57 in an avalanche while heli-skiing in the Alps. A troubled mother who took her life at 49 with an overdose of sleeping pills. But the majority of us, with parents recently deceased or heading that way had the same tale to tell. And that tale was of a slow, depressing and expensive descent into dementia or Alzheimer’s and a hazy, harrowing decrepitude.

My own mother is living in a way that is no way to live at all. Or so she tells me. She cannot get into or out of bed without assistance. She cannot walk. She can’t taste or smell anything, having irrevocably lost those two senses during her bout with Covid in 2020. She can’t clean her body or dress herself or even brush her own teeth or hair. Her depression, always a real problem, is far worse than it has ever been. She stares blankly into space and prays for the Grim Reaper’s arrival. All day, every day.

She has asked me several times recently to help her end her life. Because I do love her and secretly hope that my own children would do the same for me if I were in that state, I did try. I called a company called "Death with Dignity" in Oregon. I called an AVD (assisted voluntary death) clinic in Switzerland. I spoke a New York-based assisted suicide therapist. All to no avail. Because of my mother’s lack of a terminal illness, as well as her lack of medical records (she does not “believe” in doctors) the facilitators told me, quite gently which I appreciated, that they couldn’t help me.

I gave my mother the bad news and she said “just get me some pills and I’ll do it myself.” When I told her that I’d be happy to, but that it would be considered murder and I could wind up in jail, she laughed and said “well, that won’t bother me, I’ll be dead.”

Then she sighed an exhausted world-weary sigh and said “I wish I were an Eskimo.”

“We’re not supposed to use that word anymore,” I reminded her. “It’s now Inuit or Inupiat.”

"Don't give me grief,” she snapped. “If I were an Eskimo, you could just send me away on an ice floe and I’d die happy.”

“What are you talking about?” I asked her and she explained to me that, in the “good old days”, when elderly members of the northern tribes were lost to dementia and were too feeble to be helpful or of any use to the community they were simply bundled up, placed on an ice floe, and pushed out to sea, where they would die from hypothermia.

“That’s what we should do in America. It would be so much easier,” she assured me.

While she was lost in her reverie of being born into an Inupiat tribe in Siberia, I surreptitiously Googled her information and found out that, once again, she was right. This practice, illegal today (but not entirely abandoned), is called senilicide. “I’ve heard hypothermia is a great way to die,” she mused. “You just go sort of numb and then just drift off. I wouldn’t mind that.”

At the end of my father’s life, I asked him why he hadn’t made any plans for what would happen when he became as infirm as he was at the end.

“But I did make a plan." he told me. "I was supposed to die in my sleep at 85, in good health, and with some money in the bank for you and your siblings.” Of course, that didn’t happen. But my father did not want to leave this earth. My mother most certainly does.

When I recently asked her the same question, why she had not planned for the eventuality of getting old and helpless, she told me the exact same thing that my father had. She was "supposed" to die in her sleep in perfect health. Although she wanted to go at 80, “before my bones start to hurt.”

My parents divorced almost as soon as I was born and I found it laughably twisted that although they were not in touch at all as they descended into old age, they had independently come up with the same cockamamie end-of-party exit strategy.

“So what do you suggest?” I asked Georgia at the Shiva. “How do you arrange to off yourself before you become a burden to your family?”

“Don’t sound so sarcastic,” she told me. “I’m doing this because I love my kids and my husband and my siblings and I don’t want them to have to make any difficult decisions.”

“But you can’t just put down a person like an old and sick pet,” I reminded her.

“No. Of course not. I’ll have clauses in whatever document I rustle up with my lawyer. ‘If it’s clear that I am miserable and suffering’ for one. ‘If I’m crapping in my diapers and am totally lost to dementia’ for another. ‘If my loved ones all agree that it’s time’ ", she said, with all the optimistic vigor of a healthy 58-year-old, “then they can arrange to let me go. Most importantly, if I’m of sound mind and I’m asking to die, they need to help me die."

“If only it were that easy,” I told her, unconvinced. “It will be,” she said. “Laws are changing. I’ll figure it out.”

As I drove back to my house, I thought about my conversation with Georgia. “Is this something we need to start thinking about?” I asked my husband when I got home. He’s an optimist and does not dwell needlessly on depressing subjects like I do, so I simply assumed he would say “nah, we have all the time in the world to figure things out.”

He didn’t. What he said was “Jesus, you're dark" but then added "maybe we should make some plans. Draft something with a lawyer.”

It was then that I remembered my childhood cat, Chatham. Chatham lived to be 21. At the end of his life, he was sick and suffering with acute feline kidney failure. But we couldn’t let him go. In fact, we probably kept him alive one or two years longer than we should have with daily insulin shots. We did this because we loved him so very much. Because we could not imagine our home without him. Because he was part of our family and his death would be too traumatic. But was that fair to Chatham? Keeping a being alive so that we could postpone the grief of having to say goodbye?

Chatham was not blind or deaf or wearing diapers. He used his litter box until the end. He knew who we were and seemed to still enjoy his food. He would still purr and cuddle when picked up. Maybe it was fortunate for all of us that one day his kidneys failed completely and that was that.

I don’t want my mother to suffer. I don’t want to suffer. And I certainly don’t want my husband or kids to suffer on my behalf. I don’t know what I’m going to do but at least, thanks to Georgia, my husband and I have started the conversation. These complicated life or death decisions we’re facing feel disturbing. Dystopian. And sad. But in a strange way, they also feel like love.