Last night I watched Portland filmmaker Peter Richardson's How to Die in Oregon on HBO, and that wasn't easy. In the past months, both of my wife's parents have died, her father quite recently, so the anxiety and sadness are very close to the surface. No matter how it goes, you have doubts -- could we have made it easier for them? Which is another way of saying, could we have made it easier on ourselves?
"Easier" here is the tricky word, because honestly we don't know. We don't get to experiment with different ways of dying to find out the one we want. We assume the less pain the better, but when we are attending a loved one who is approaching death, we can't be sure what that means. Not even the doctors can -- how many milligrams of this, how many milligrams of that.
We also assume that the more control we have over the death experience, the better. That's the rationale behind Oregon's 1994 Death With Dignity Act: If you are consciousness and dying, you should be able to choose when you die, have the means prescribed to accomplish your death and do it legally.
Richardson's How to Die in Oregon tells several stories that explore real experiences connected to the Death With Dignity Act, all of which give human depth to the provisions of the law. The central story, though, is that of Cody Curtis, who has terminal cancer. And here, the use of the word easier become ridiculous, because her experience is not easy. It's painful physically (sometimes more than others) and in every other way you can imagine, because she lives with it, with her impending death, consciously all the time.
