Status Updates From The Day I Die: The Untold S...

“Grief is singular, bound to those who suffer from it,” writes anthropologist Robert Desjarlais. “Grief itself cannot be shared, much as a wound cannot be shared. That cut is a person’s burden alone.”

In the first twenty-three years since Oregon passed the Death with Dignity Act, 2,895 patients received prescriptions under the law, and 1,905 died from ingesting the fatal drugs. That means that one-third of all patients who requested the medication never took it.

Between 2001 and 2018, about half of all patients in Oregon who ingested Seconal died within twenty-five minutes (twenty minutes for Nembutal).

It wasn’t until 1990, with the passage of the federal Patient Self-Determination Act, that patients across America were granted the right to reject medical treatment at the end of life.

To this day, the American Medical Association opposes assisted dying, arguing that the practice (which they refer to as “physician-assisted suicide”) “is fundamentally incompatible with the physician’s role as healer.”

“I think that we keep people alive artificially in this country. We overmedicate and overtreat and overprescribe procedures. I would like to think that when my time is ready, I’ll know, and I’ll be glad to go. I have an expiration date, and I want to honor that.”

I feel the same as Derianna

Until well into the nineteenth century, suicide was considered a crime in America, punishable with confiscation of the deceased’s property and denial of a Christian burial.

Today, the end of life has become so medicalized that death is frequently seen as a failure rather than an expected stage of life. In the face of societal pressures toward staying young and fit, and a nearly unshakable trust in the power of medicine, death has come to be seen as an enemy to be defeated.

Hospice and palliative care have been at the forefront of a critical paradigm shift away from unnecessary—and often harmful—life-extending measures toward accepting and easing the process of dying. Since the 1970s, they have emerged as an antidote to the excesses of heroic medicine—our growing ability to prolong life through technological intervention, the “more is better” approach of modern medicine.

The point is that a patient must be able to start and stop the flow of medication on their own. That action, however tiny, is seen as expressing a prized American value—autonomous will—a final safeguard meant to ensure the voluntary nature of a patient’s death.

This sounds kind of discriminatory if you consider someone with ALS.

When systemic racism continues to haunt medical encounters in communities of color—and when death itself may be the result of deep-seated health inequalities—then an expedited death might not seem very appealing.

By statistics this can explain why the percentages are higher for white population.

An assisted death often resulted in less complicated grief as well. Loved ones didn’t feel as blindsided.

For over a decade, from 1997 to 2008, Oregon was the only state that permitted a medically assisted death. Since then, nine other states and Washington, DC, have legalized the practice.

Patients with serious cognitive impairment, such as advanced dementia, are excluded from assisted dying laws in America, even if they have a terminal prognosis. Assisted dying laws also specify that patients must be able to ingest the life-ending medication themselves—euthanasia, the act of a physician ending a patient’s life with a lethal injection, is expressly forbidden.

A former nurse and midwife, Derianna treated a death the same way she treated a birth—as a sacred transition from one state of being to another. Her job, as she saw it, was to help facilitate that transition and carry a person over the threshold between life and death.