RockSlider wrote:Jersey Girl wrote:Rock I've read many an account and story about death with dignity. Watched videos and followed the journey's of two particular cancer patients who made different choices. One chose euthanasia and the other did not. The one who did not choose euthanasia happened to be local to me and so I followed very closely because more information was available to me locally and online.
It's difficult to know what I would do in such a circumstance. Believing what I do believe about God, I don't think I could do it. I believe God has a purpose for me and my life right up to my last breath. Like he did Jesus, in fact. So...I think (again, not knowing what I would actually do) that I would trust my God until the last breath.
I could never criticize the choice of others. I'm simply saying what my own perspective is and what it's based on.
Thanks Jersey Girl. I've been listening to several angles on this as well. There are those cases where the individual might be "playing god" (cases tend to be drawing a line in the sand on quality of life) verses care givers playing god (giving artificial life support to one god was calling home).
Well I might have more to say later but I'm going through my own "story" right now and I don't want to disrupt the process at the moment. So, I will just give you two links to the women I mentioned if you'd like to add those to your growing collection of perspectives.
Brittany Maynard (death with dignity)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brittany_MaynardKara Tippetts (local story)
This is a link to Kara's blog. You'd have to scroll back and read her entries or look for more information on her. I have her book "The Hardest Peace".
https://www.mundanefaithfulness.com/These two journey's were happening basically simultaneously and I appreciated following both of these women as they dealt with their own deaths each in their own particular way. There are also youtube videos on their experiences and reasoning--some are interviews.
I'd like to think that I would follow Kara's path. But I won't know what I would do until and unless I reach that point in my life. I do absolutely believe in hospice care regardless what the final choice may be.
I've visited the terminally ill and also removed life support from my own mother. I learned from everyone of my experiences. Sometimes the lessons were spiritual and sometimes they brought me new knowledge or allowed me to witness things I had only read about.
I think I want to share one of those instances. (And I wasn't planning to tell an stories.) I had read that in some cancer patients, that near the end of life (literal hours before death) that the brain begins firing off it's last hurrah so to speak. There's a word for it, I can't recall as I'm writing this. This stage of death involves the person appearing to have suddenly recovered and leads people to believe that recovery is going to happen.
I witnessed this phenomenon with my own eyes and ears. A co-worker who was dying from ovarian cancer. I saw her illness begin to take her at work. You couldn't miss that something was horribly wrong with "K". Then we heard about the hospitalization, the surgery, and then hospice. It was Easter weekend that year.
My daughter (also a co-worker at the time) and I went to visit her that weekend. The first day we visited, K was lying in bed and the situation looked bleak as it surely was bleak. She didn't appear to be conscious at all. I assumed she was sedated and had only hours to live. She had lost so much weight from the surgery and tumor removal. And yet, she was so beautiful.
This was a woman with reddish maroon hair and porcelain skin, a Southern lady with a sassy attitude and deep love for others. She had just turned 50. She was an infant caregiver who had lost her own infant, and so she devoted herself to caring for other women's babies and I'll tell you what, no one could do it like she did. The care she put into her environment was spectacular in it's execution. You wouldn't have believed what she could do to honor those babies. She would be there with 3 babies, one on each thigh and one on her "pillows". K was well endowed. ;-). For the first time ever we saw her thin. And her precious pillows whereupon she comforted so many infants for their mothers, were gone. We spoke to K, only stayed a short while because we didn't want to rob the family of their final moments with her.
We returned the next day, Sunday, and weren't sure what we'd be walking into but we knew K was still alive and we were willing to face whatever we were met with. I've done it before, my kids know this about me and now they do the same thing. Just go and show up, and be whatever you can be to people.
When we got near the room, we could hear chatter. Someone was talking happily...it sounded like K. And it was K. She was sitting upright in bed, she was awake, aware and talking. She knew exactly who she was talking to and what she was saying. She was smiling. WHAT? WHAT?
She caught our eye with a smile when we rounded the door. She told my daughter how beautiful she looked. We usually wore casual clothing to work but for our visit we dressed up, it was Easter Sunday and we did it to bring cheer and respect to K. We talked quite a while and as we were leaving, K said to me "Don't bump your head on the door".
And I said, "Look at you making a short joke!" And that was the last thing I ever said to her. We ended with a laugh and a smile. K died the next morning while we were at work. The whole program gave tribute to her, even the children in my class and my daughter's class of preschoolers. They knew all along that Miss K was very ill. We shared her story and our tears with the children. Some of the children prayed for her. They honored her with a wall mural they made with their own hands in purple paint. K's favorite color. <3
I count these experiences amongst my most enormous blessings in life. To share the final event, to be able to be there, to touch someone, to speak to someone, to pray with someone who wants it, to be able to show up and be whatever I can be to people.
I believe in what I call rippling effects. One person's experience can send a ripple of waves through the lives of others and in my experience with terminally ill persons, that's exactly what has happened.
