Knocking on Heaven's Door: The Path to a Better Way of Death Read Free Page A

outside Siena in Italy. He
    went on to marry my mother, earn a PhD from Oxford, coach
    rugby, build floor-to-ceiling bookcases for our living room, and
    with my two younger brothers as crew, sail his beloved Rhodes
    19 on Long Island Sound. When I was a teenager and often at
    odds with him, he would sometimes wake me chortling lines
    from The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam in a high falsetto:“Awake, my little one! Before life’s liquor in its cup be dry!” On weekend afternoons, he would put a record on the stereo and strut
    around the living room conducting invisible orchestras. At night
    he would stand in our bedroom doorways and say goodnight to
    my two brothers and me quoting Horatio’s farewell to the dying
    Hamlet: “May flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!”
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    Four decades later, in the house where he once chortled and
    strutted and sometimes thundered, I had to coach him to take
    off his slippers before he tried to put on his shoes.
    My mother put down her teacup. She was eighty-three, as
    lucid and bright as a sword point, and more elegant in her black
    jeans and thin cashmere sweater than I could ever hope to be.
    She put her hand, hard, on my arm. “He is killing me,” she
    said. “He. Is. Ruining. My. Life.” Then she crossed her ankles
    and put her head between her knees, a remedy for near-fainting
    that she’d clipped from a newspaper column and pinned to the
    bulletin board behind her. She was taking care of my father for
    about a hundred hours a week.
    I looked at her and thought of Anton Chekhov, the writer
    and physician who died of tuberculosis in 1904 when he was
    only forty-four. “Whenever there is someone in a family who has
    long been ill, and hopelessly ill,” he wrote, “There come pain-
    ful moments when all, timidly, secretly, at the bottom of their
    hearts long for his death.” A century afterward, my mother and
    I had come to long for the machine in my father’s heart to fail.
    How we got there is a long story, but here are a few of the bones.
    On November 13, 2001, when he was seventy-nine and appar-
    ently vigorous, my father suffered a devastating stroke. A year
    later—gravely disabled yet clear-minded enough to know it—
    he was outfitted with a pacemaker in a moment of hurry and
    hope. The device kept his heart going while doing nothing to
    prevent his slide, over five years, into dementia, incontinence,
    near-muteness, misery, and helplessness. The burden of his
    care crushed my mother. In January 2007, when my father no
    longer understood the purpose of a dinner napkin, I learned
    that his pacemaker could be turned off painlessly and without
    surgery, thus opening a door to a relatively peaceful death. It
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    katy butler
    was a death I both feared and desired, as I sat at the kitchen
    table ten months later, watching my mother’s face as she raised
    her head from her knees.
    Her words thrummed inside me: Help me get your father’s
    pacemaker turned off. I’d been hoping for months to hear her
    say something like this, but now that she’d spoken, I was the
    one with doubts. This was a moral choice for which neither
    the Anglicanism of my English childhood nor my adopted Bud-
    dhism had prepared me. I shook when I imagined watching
    someone disable his pacemaker—and shook even more when I
    contemplated trying to explain it to him.
    At the same time, I feared that if I did nothing, his doctors
    would continue to prolong what was left of my father’s life until
    my mother went down with him. My fear was not unfounded:
    in the 1980s, while working as a reporter for the San Francisco
    Chronicle, I spent six weeks in the intensive care unit of San
    Francisco General Hospital, watching the erasure of the once-
    bright line between saving a life and prolonging a dying. I’d
    never forgotten what I’d seen.
    If my father got pneumonia, once called “the