Healthy at age 74, my mother decided there was nothing on earth still keeping her here, not even us. So she announced her plans to visit Pegasos in Switzerland for an assisted suicide.
Do you know how many grams of Nembutal it takes to put an elephant to sleep?” asks the anesthesiologist from Pegasos, a voluntary-assisted-death organization in Switzerland, after an evaluative look at my mother.
Mom didn’t have cancer or Lou Gehrig’s disease or any of the illnesses that typically qualify you for assisted death. A cataract in her left eye had deteriorated, and though she had some foot pain and had gotten a pacemaker, all of which weighed on her, she was quite healthy for her age. She had completed a marathon just a few years before at 68.
My sister and I immediately believed she would go through with it. A lifelong libertarian, my mother believed firmly in maintaining her independence. Since she was 21, she had a living will with significant restrictions on when she wanted to be resuscitated. Mom had been brought up with a strict sense of what was appropriate, which was essentially a list of rules on how to avoid imposing on others .
When I was about 8, my mother started up with a professor of anthropology at Columbia, where she had begun the Ph.D. she wouldn’t finish. He smoked cigars and was fat. Mom was entranced. By his intellect, she said. One Sunday in late fall, my mother, my sister, and I were on our way back to the city from East Hampton when Mom decided to stop to get a poinsettia for the professor.
It was decades later, when I was in a healthy marriage with three children of my own, that I started to see how wrong it all was. Back then, I couldn’t let myself feel angry at my mother; it was too dangerous. Any hint of disapproval could be the moment she cut you off, and once out, there was no way back in.
If I’m being honest, I am glad she has a backup plan, even if I hate the specifics. Though the idea of cutting ties with her has crossed my mind, I’ve refrained, more out of a sense of duty to her and my sister than from any joy I get from our relationship. The decades have refused to soften her, and on visits, I’d watch as she snapped at the children and then wondered why they retreated to their rooms to read.
Thirteen days. I’ve been calling her more frequently, panning for any evidence that we could speak truthfully. She tells me every time that she has nothing interesting to say. Once, my call goes to voice-mail and she texts an explanation; she’s getting her legs waxed. Twelve days. She’s having good-bye dinners and lunches. Some participants know, but some don’t.
Monday ends. Then Tuesday. Vicious eczema erupts on my chin. I lie in bed awake every night from midnight until 5 a.m. My husband still isn’t convinced she’ll go through with it. My sister and I contemplate how things will shift if she changes her mind at the last minute. We decide that, for this year, we’d just skip the holidays as a family.
Less than one week left. For the first time in my life, real rage. It bubbles up as dreams in which I shake her violently and only sawdust comes out. How can she value my sister and me — and our beautiful, kind, sparkly children — so little as to choose to leave us? And is she really going to go without any kind of reckoning with the person and parent she was, with the damage she has done? It feels horribly cyclical.
The night before she is scheduled to kill herself, we have a sumptuous dinner at the Brasserie au Violon, the site of a former prison; my mother chose the venue as a joke.— has been moved from Thursday morning to the early afternoon. Another lifetime of waiting. By 9 a.m., the clouds have broken, and my mother is already dressed, her hair in curlers. She is sitting on the bed, looking at her computer. My sister and I suggest a walk. My mother declines: “I’m doing emails.
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