To Love, No Right To Die

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Act of love: The life and death of Donna Mae Hill

Somehow, my mother and her sister developed completely different politics. After high school, my mother and Dottie both went to Oberlin College, intentionally choosing a university famous for being a leader in admitting women and black students. Mom graduated in with a B. It was a passion that directed the course of her life — from the man she chose to marry to the values she passed on to her children who passed them on to her grandchildren to her decision about how and when she wanted to die. On our last morning together in Toronto, I made her poached eggs and tried not to worry or fuss as she struggled with her trembling hands to move the food from fork to mouth.

After eating, we sat over coffee — I gave her just half a cup at a time, to minimize spillage — and split the newspaper between us. In early May, we took our last walk together on the street where she had lived since We discussed the forthcoming provincial election, and she said she regretted that she would not be able to vote against Doug Ford, the Progressive Conservative candidate. In my childhood, our neighbourhood went mostly Tory blue, and I asked her if she had felt self-conscious, when I was a child, to live in the only home on the street with an orange NDP sign planted in the yard.

Alone, I was usually able to hold back my own sadness, but it became impossible to keep my emotions in check when I watched the tears and hugged the trembling shoulders of my son, daughters, closest friends and even my Aunt Dottie, who flew from San Diego to Toronto to say goodbye to her sister. People in her immediate circle knew about her plans to die, but my mother did not advertise the fact widely; she did not have the energy to explain herself over and over again, and she did not want to go through the difficult process of saying goodbye to hundreds of people.

On the other hand, my mother was incapable of lying. My mother said that it was not a good time. Her friend asked if they could meet the following month. There is no turning back on Canada's physician-assisted dying laws. Yet for every step forward, patients and their families face new roadblocks. Sandra Martin looks at what it will take to finally reach the end.

My mother joined Dying with Dignity in the s and, as early as , she began writing living wills and sharing them with her doctors and family. Mom told anyone who would listen that if she should ever fall victim to a stroke, heart attack or major accident, she did not want to be kept alive artificially or with the aid of machines or technology.

She desired only to have her pain controlled and to be allowed to die. My father had also joined Dying with Dignity, but when his health began to decline in the early s, he opted to receive all the medical help he could get. My mother believed that he did so only out of love for her, to stretch out the more generous pension benefits she would receive while he was still alive. My mother cared for my father night and day for the 10 years leading up to his death. He had three amputations. He had many infections, and was in constant pain. He was in and out of hospitals. His mental lucidity diminished profoundly.

Mom kept constant vigil over him, and appeared to age 30 years in a single decade. She repeatedly told my siblings and me that she did not want to die that way. Once, when Mom learned that an old friend had died suddenly in his sleep, she said to me: After my father died in , my mother continued to live alone in the four-bedroom childhood home where we grew up in Don Mills.

She loved to be visited, but she did not want to live with anyone else or to move into a nursing home. Mom had numerous medical issues. None of them were life-threatening, but together they increased her desire to die before things got worse. For the last 15 years of her life, Mom was living with short-term memory loss; a painful hernia the size of a cantaloupe; irritable bowel disease that often caused her to flee public events in embarrassment or to cancel social commitments; and pronounced hand tremors that made it difficult to cook, slice food or eat and made it unsafe for her to handle hot food.

In addition, she had near deafness never resolved by expensive hearing aids or by multiple visits to the audiologist. She could not hear or follow any group conversation. She could only hear and respond when there was silence in the room and one interlocutor at a time spoke close to her ear. Her social life was limited to one-on-one conversations. Sometime around , my mother asked me to help her take her own life.

I inject insulin daily to manage diabetes, and Mom asked me to show her how to use the insulin pens and to leave enough on her kitchen table so that she could kill herself. I felt a wave of sympathy for Mom, and thought again about how profoundly her own health, vigour and zest for life had dwindled during the years she had nursed her dying husband, and in the years after he died. I felt sad that my own life, and that of my brother and sister and wife and children, was not enough to motivate Mom to go on living.

But I could understand that she was all used up. Even in her final years, she always gave us a big hug when we came in the door, and had us take turns sitting close to her so she could hear about our lives, and stood by the door waving as we drove away — but I could also understand that she was done with living. When Mom asked for my help in dying, I felt moved by her utter trust and faith in me. However, I also knew that I could not fulfill her request.

I called a lawyer, and a day or two later, I told my mother that I could not agree to her request. To do so could expose me to being charged with assisted suicide. Conviction, I told her, could result in a year jail sentence. Later, my brother Dan told me that Mom also asked for his help in dying; he, too, refused.

I wished I could help my mother, but I would not break the law. I understood that my mother was ready to die. I felt that she deserved to end her life on her own terms. On May 17, my mother entered the apartment in Liestal, sat down at a table and promptly began signing papers. As soon as the paperwork was done, the nurse rolled an IV unit up to a single bed; my mother stood up, walked over to the bed and got onto it.

Mom had already told me that she had been waiting for years to die; there would be no wasting time when she was finally able to go. But my mother worried about Malaika, who had slipped out of view to sob in an adjacent room. I had spent the better part of a year helping my mother prepare her final journey and I would not leave her side until she took her final breath. Donna and her husband, Daniel G. Hill III, tend to their three children: Dan, Lawrence and Karen. Lawrence remembers his mother instilling a love of words and of social justice at a young age.

My mother met my father in in the interracial housing co-op where she lived in Washington. She was serving Barbadian rum to friends on the front porch; he came to visit another woman. My mother and father looked at each other and that was it. She was volunteering with the civil-rights organization Americans for Democratic Action, which staged sit-ins at department-store food counters that refused to serve blacks. She also worked as a secretary in the office of Democratic senator Herbert Lehman.

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The senator was among the people who congratulated her when she said that she was marrying an African-American. Not everyone responded so positively. Because they were an interracial couple, they could not find a landlord who was willing to rent them an apartment in the city. So my mother went with a white friend to rent an apartment, and as soon as she secured it, the friend moved out and my father moved in. While my father began his doctoral studies, my mother supported him by working for the Toronto Labour Committee for Human Rights.

Mom led the Labour Committee in asking the Ontario government, under the leadership of premier Leslie Frost, to enact anti-discrimination legislation. Inevitably, that person would be told with quintessential Canadian politeness that the job, apartment or meal was unfortunately no longer available. Then my mother would send in a white person — sometimes she would go herself — to see if they could get the job, apartment or meal. But after the province eventually introduced more vigorous human-rights legislation, it was my father who would become the first director, and later the chairperson, of the Ontario Human Rights Commission, as well as the Ombudsman of Ontario.

Although my mother had been an activist long before my father developed a public reputation as a human-rights leader, she quickly slipped into the background. She quit her job to give birth to her oldest child, my brother, Dan Hill, on June 3, Over the next decades, it frustrated and saddened my mother that she had to put aside her career ambitions to become a wife and mother.

She never sought attention or accolades, but she did want to work. She loved my father and he loved her, and their year relationship was one of the most playful and affectionate that I have ever seen, but Dad did not want Mom to work outside the home and, for the most part, he prevailed. With my father and friends, my mother co-founded the Ontario Black History Society and for many years she volunteered behind the scenes to manage their affairs.

She edited and typed — on the same L. A Sociological Study of a Minority Group. The Reminiscences of Harry Gairey , which was an oral history of the life of a Jamaican Canadian immigrant who became a railroad porter and civil-rights activist. In the s, she travelled to Ottawa to petition the federal government to repeal immigration policies that discriminated against black people from the Caribbean.

She volunteered with Peace Magazine in Toronto. Mom brought me into the world in and my sister, Karen, the following year. She sang and read to us every night before we went to bed, inspiring in me a love of story, and a love of words. One of my earliest memories is of her sitting on the edge of my bed and chanting the lines to A. In addition to her love, my mother brought activism into the home.

There should be no buying or consuming any Aunt Jemima products because of the racist stereotype of the happy black slave woman; there was to be no buying of any fruit or wine or any product whatsoever from South Africa, for as long as apartheid lasted; and there should be no buying of fruit from California for as long as Latino farm workers were exploited in that state.

If I was served food in another house, Mom said it was my duty to ask where the fruit came from. Same thing for syrup and pancakes. There was no eating unless I knew the provenance of the ingredients. She trusted that we, her children, would catch on. She knew that we would uphold her values. George and Shirley Brickenden, who were married for almost 73 years, were one of the few couples in Canada to receive a doctor-assisted death together, and the first to speak about it publicly.

Kelly Grant tells their story. In the room in Liestal, Mr. Habegger asked Mom to sit up again, so he could prepare the video recorder. She hated photos, and had generally refused to pose for them in the last 10 years of her life. But this time, sitting on a simple single bed in a sparsely furnished apartment in a small town in Switzerland, she posed willingly. She looked calm and happy. She looked more than happy — she looked radiant. After the photos, she laid back down. The nurse approached her. She saw a look of concern flash across my face. Malaika, who had come back into the room, sat a foot away on a stool.

I told Mom how much I loved her, that she had inspired me to live beautifully and to love well and that I would never forget her. In return, Mom told Malaika and me again — as she had so many times over the past days in Basel — that she loved us, and how fortunate she was to be loved by family members who supported her wish to die on her own terms.

Mom then thanked the nurse and Mr. Habegger for helping her have a medically assisted death. Leaning close to her right ear, I started singing the Brahms Lullaby that Mom often sang to me when I was young. Mom sang along with me, enthusiastically and in tune. It astounded me that she sang with such gusto in her final moments.

Once more, I was awestruck by her courage. She showed no remorse. In , when Mom was 37 and I was 8, she developed bipolar disorder. She had to be hospitalized for a long time.

I still remember the ache of missing her, and the horror of seeing her leave the house with my father and him returning alone. When I finally got to see her, she looked like a shell of herself. She barely looked like my mother at all. Her twin sister, Dottie, developed bipolar disorder within a year. Their psychiatrists conferred and each began prescribing lithium, which my mother took until her last days in Switzerland. For about 20 years, Mom entered into periodic bouts of mania, followed by hospitalization, followed by depression.

She would get ill every five or so years. I learned to read the signs: She would stop sleeping, start pacing the house at night, move from one activity to the next to the next without stopping to accomplish anything and her mind would be on fire. I often became the one to say it was time to take her to the hospital. Sometimes I sat with her in the back seat while Dad drove. I assimilated the language of emergency rooms. It is not easy to get your mother admitted to a psych wing. You have to say just the right things — especially as a curly-haired mixed race child who is talking to white doctors.

Mom met regularly with psychiatrists from until the final year of her life. I believe that my mother had learned to cope decades ago with her bipolarity, and that her wish to die reflected her personal, philosophical and political values. The Hills in Lawrence, far right, would learn to recognize the signs of his mother's bouts with mental illness. Do you know what happens when you open that valve? My mother attempted suicide three times in the last five years of her life. On two of the three occasions, I was the one to find her, call and accompany her to the hospital. Every time I drove from Hamilton to visit my mother, I worried about what I might find when I opened the door.

Her youngest child — my sister, Karen, the mother of my niece Malaika — died in an accident in Twice a week, the two would get together. Mom would buy the food, and Karen would make a feast. They ate together, laughed together, went out walking together and got along like a house on fire. Mom was unable to shed a single tear when Karen died. I think she believed that if she opened up the tap of grief, she would drown in her own sadness.

In the second one, she injured another driver.

The deviousness of dementia | Dasha Kiper

Her own face was cut and bruised. My mother resented the loss of her independence, hated having to call people to ask for rides and felt increasingly isolated and house-bound. After Mom recovered from her second suicide attempt, Dan and I arranged to have a formal meeting with her. We both told Mom her suicide attempts were traumatizing. She said she wished she had succeeded. We talked about assisted death.

Mom wanted to die in Ontario. In , when the Supreme Court of Canada ruled in favour of medically assisted deaths, it gave the federal government time to come up with new legislation. My mother, my brother and I felt a glimmer of hope — maybe my mother would finally have the chance to end her life painlessly. We felt crushed when, in , the federal government announced new legislation, Bill C, which was too restrictive. He or she must have a serious and incurable illness, disease or disability.

Right to live, right to die

He or she must experience intolerable physical and psychological suffering. For my mother, nearly 90 years old, dedicated to her adoptive country for 65 years, there would be no relief at home.

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How old did she have to be for death to be considered imminent? She was ready now. But Canada would not allow it. The restrictive conditions infuriated my mother personally and politically. Reluctantly, Mom considered the option of leaving the country. A family friend looked into possibilities overseas and came back with the news that Eternal Spirit seemed legitimate and respected.

Later, I learned that, in , Eternal Spirit helped 19 Swiss citizens and 61 foreigners die. Forty per cent of the patients are men and 60 per cent, women. About two Canadians come to Eternal Spirit to die each year. Mom, Dan and I met again to talk about it. But she balked when she heard the price tag.

Mom said again that she wished she could have a medically assisted death in Ontario, and Dr. Cohen said that would not likely be possible. Dan and I both wanted to make it absolutely clear, not just to Mom but also to her psychiatrist, that we did not want Mom to take her own life. However, if she truly wanted to die, Switzerland would be a much better alternative than one more botched suicide attempt at home. The term right to die has been interpreted in a number of ways, including issues of suicide, passive euthanasia, active euthanasia, assisted suicide, and physician-assisted suicide.

That year, the Supreme Court heard two appeals arguing that New York and Washington statutes that made physician assisted suicide a felony violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. While in New York this has maintained statutes banning physician assisted suicide, the Court's decision also left it open for other states to decide whether they would allow physician assisted suicide or not. Since , five states in the US have passed assisted suicide laws: Oregon, Washington, Vermont, California, and Colorado passed legislation in , , , , and , respectively, that provides a protocol for the practice of physician assisted suicide.

In , the Montana Supreme Court ruled that nothing in state law prohibits physician-assisted suicide and provides legal protection for physicians in the case that they write a prescription for lethal medication upon patient request. In California, the governor signed a controversial physician assisted-suicide bill, the California End of Life Option Act , in October that passed during a special legislative session intended to address Medi-Cal funding, [26] after it had been defeated during the regular legislative session.

In early , a New Mexico Second District Judge Nan Nash ruled that terminally ill patients have the right to aid in dying under the state constitution, i. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. For other uses, see Right to die disambiguation. Assessment of risk Crisis hotline list Intervention Prevention Suicide watch. Asphyxiation Hanging Train Cop Seppuku. List of suicides Suicide in antiquity List of suicides in the 21st century.

Banzai charge Kamikaze Suicide attack Suicide mission. Euthanasia in the Netherlands. Euthanasia in New Zealand. Euthanasia in the United States. Archived from the original on 19 December Retrieved 14 December Retrieved June 20, Assisted Suicide for Healthy People". Retrieved 16 July Four problems, one simple solution".

Retrieved 2 January Maximum Media; Dublin, Ireland. Retrieved 22 June Retrieved 24 November Archived from the original on 3 March Lawyer with cancer embarks on challenge to New Zealand's euthanasia laws". Retrieved 5 June What is considered a human right is controversial and not all the topics listed are universally accepted as human rights. Cannabis rights Equality before the law Freedom from arbitrary arrest and detention Freedom of assembly Freedom of association Freedom from cruel and unusual punishment Freedom from discrimination Freedom from exile Freedom of information Freedom of movement Freedom of religion Freedom from slavery Freedom of speech Freedom of thought Freedom from torture Legal aid Liberty LGBT rights Nationality Personhood Presumption of innocence Right of asylum Right to die Right to a fair trial Right to family life Right to keep and bear arms Right to life Right to petition Right to privacy Right to protest Right to refuse medical treatment Right of self-defense Security of person Universal suffrage.

Economic, social and cultural. Digital rights Equal pay for equal work Fair remuneration Labor rights Right to an adequate standard of living Right to clothing Right to development Right to education Right to food Right to health Right to housing Right to Internet access Right to property Right to public participation Right of reply Right of return Right to science and culture Right to social security Right to water Right to work Trade union membership.

Civilian Combatant Freedom from genocide Prisoner of war Wartime sexual violence. Assessment of suicide risk Crisis hotline List of suicide crisis lines Suicidal ideation Suicide intervention Suicidology Suicide prevention Suicide watch. Suicide in antiquity List of suicides List of suicides in the 21st century.

Retrieved from " https: Euthanasia Suicide Human rights by issue. Articles with inconsistent citation formats Articles with Dutch-language external links CS1 maint: Views Read Edit View history. This page was last edited on 6 December , at

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