“It’s Time.”

(Editor’s Note: Thank you, Clyde Morgan, for sharing your heart-felt story below. — KTB)

It was the 23^rd of January, 2002, a chilly but not-so-cold night, two days before his 17^th birthday. For some forgotten reason, we decided to sleep out behind our home on the backyard slope, me in my Army sleeping bag, he atop his. One more day, and it was his Big Day, but I had a hard decision to make. Actually, I had already made the decision but was having a difficult time accepting it. So, Buddy and I slept out together, one more time – one last time.

I had already written our vet who had responded and agreed by phone, so all I had to do was dial his number and say, “This is Clyde, and it’s time.” I dialed his number the next morning after we awoke, but I couldn’t speak. No matter how hard I tried I could not say, “It’s time.” Jim, knowing Buddy and me well and being an experienced vet, understood. I heard Jim’s truck pull into our driveway ten minutes after Buddy and I went into the house. True to form, Buddy alerted with two sharp, short barks. Jim came thru the back door into our kitchen, Buddy, now on the kitchen floor with his big head in my lap, paid no attention to him.

A gentle shot into his thigh, thirty seconds later his eyes closed, and two minutes after that he quit breathing. A few minutes more of my gently stroking his head, and I could tell he was dead.

Putting him on the passenger seat of my truck, we drove to the crematorium. An hour later I received him in his mahogany box. I placed the box on the seat by my side, started for home, and threw up in my truck. One year and 37 firefights in Vietnam never got to me like that. Two, more like three years later, I could talk about Buddy, but not for a while. Had I to do it all over again, I would do it all over again. He was 17, weighed 110 pounds with a right hip from Mississippi State University’s School of Veterinary Medicine, his big body almost rigid from arthritis, in constant pain, and the most wonderful Black Lab one could ever know. I was determined, since I could not heal him, to end his suffering and mine. Hard choice.

Since all living beings die, we humans frequently face hard choices during and at the end of our lives and during the lives of our loved ones. It is strange to me how few of us plan for it, other than purchasing burial policies—a strangeness worthy of comment.

The last time I visited my maternal grandmother she did not see me nor know I was there. She was in an unkempt nursing home, curled up in bed, facing a wall with peeling paint, quietly saying over and over, “I want to die. I want to die.” I attended her funeral, but only after many more weeks of her suffering needlessly.

I shall never forget my father in a nursing home, knowing he was dying and wanting to do so in his own bed, quietly saying, “Take me home. I would do the same for you.” My mother had suffered a nervous breakdown trying to care for him, and she would soon be in a nursing home where she would die, alone, in the dead of night, of Alzheimer’s. I could not comply with my father’s request, and it was the last time I spoke with or saw him alive, he feeling alone, unloved and abandoned.

Surveys reveal that because of religious beliefs my home state of Mississippi and forty others will not grant to me what I gave to my dog – the right to die, the right to end my suffering if I were suffering or to end the indignities and expense I would involuntarily, unintentionally inflict on my wonderful relatives and caretakers during my extended period of dying. Laws in the United States against physician-assisted suicide (PAS) exist even though at least half of all Americans favor it.

Of 18 religious denominations in the United States, the 14 largest are the most vociferous in their objection to PAS. The four smaller ones include three that are ambivalent and one in support of it. The religious reasons most often heard against PAS are that it violates God’s divine laws, that the right to give and take human life belongs to God, and that life is sacred. Even a cursory reading of both the Old and the New Testaments shreds those arguments.

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are rights we are guaranteed in our unique Constitution. But, if I do not have the right to end my life when and where I so choose, then I have no right of liberty, and I am not truly free. The government controls my life and its end!

Our medical professionals take the Hippocratic Oath to “First do no harm.” But, keeping a person alive who does not want to live causes harm; prolonging suffering, pain, or indignity, no matter how well-intentioned, causes harm; one person imposing his or her values on another person causes harm.

In the event of an incurable illness, I can visualize a unique, interesting, comforting scene. I am in my bed at home, devoid of life-sustaining medicines by way of tubes and needles save for one with a fluid to end my life. My family and close friends are there, talking with me and each other, reminiscing, remembering good times and bad, some even funny, perhaps quietly crying while I assure them that I am very happy, how much I have enjoyed my challenging life, that I love each one of them, and that I hope to be with them once more at another time and place. In spite of myself I grow weary but muster the strength to tell my nurse or doctor, “Its time.” – followed by blissful, pain-free sleep and whatever else may or may not await.

I shall spend the remainder of my life attempting to make it so.