Sir Terry Pratchett (and I bet he delights in having “prat” as part of his name), diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s, has come out in favor of assisted suicide. But I’m not going to talk about him. I’m going to talk about my own beloved Alzheimer’s case.
My great aunt was lucky. She was 92, and had mostly lost who we were. Most of her friends, all of her siblings were already dead, though she forgot that with increasing regularity. We started lying to her about it. Anything was better than seeing the pain and sorrow cross her face as if it were the first time she had learned the news. Even now, the memory of her reaction the first time I walked into that situation, brings tears to my eyes. You never want to hug a crying 90 year old when you tell them their ‘baby’ brother is dead, and has been for the past 3 years.
During the last month, she kept asking when she could go home. She had forgotten her house of nearly 50 years. She’d forgotten her husband had passed away 6 years prior. She stopped eating.
She had a living will, written years before so she wouldn’t be kept alive in a twilight existence in some scary nursing home, cared for by strangers, hooked up to machines. She didn’t want an existence empty of us.
We took her to hospice, where they allowed her to die in ‘comfort’ over the course of ten days. She had stopped eating before we took her in. When she got there, she was insensate most of the time. She’d occasionally have tears in her eyes, but didn’t drink any water.
The best we were legally allowed to do was keep her drugged up so she couldn’t feel any pain. Or so we hope. Waiting ten days for someone to slowly die is a truly awful experience.
You have to go to work, jumping with an adrenaline spike and a lump in your throat every time the phone rings, is this it, was I not there?
I started my leave of absence early, on her last day. Everyone had been to visit by that time, it was only me, my girl, my mother, aunt and the occasional nurse.
Four hours spent waiting for her last breath to come.
Torture.
Grieving for an inevitable death.
Knowing suffocation is a terrible experience for a body. Hoping the drugs work.
She had already started to look and smell dead a few days prior.
I know many of our families’ friends wouldn’t have agreed with our decision, but if the option had been available, we’d have chose euthanasia, or at least I would have pressed for it – I’m pretty sure my mother and aunt would have gone for it, but it’s hard to say sometimes what your brain my do during those times of duress.
My grandpa died at home, in his bedroom, no Alzheimer’s, just metastatic cancer. He was in bed for a day. I wish my aunt could have been granted that same mercy, palliative drugs or no.
I fervently hope to never again have to watch someone die for ten days. You can’t yet grieve for their death, but you grieve anyway, it’s a cloud over your life, it’s pain until death brings surcease.