Lillian’s Story: Pride and Prejudice

(The author is a sociologist who has written and consulted internationally in the area of women’s rights and sexual and reproductive health. She taught 18 years at the University of California, Davis. UC Berkeley’s alumni magazine, California, recently published her article, Death, Life, and the Right to Draw Your Own Line, where some of Lillian’s story was originally told. – Jay Niver, editor)

 

Lillian could be funny and deadly serious, often at the same time. Smart, engaging and acerbic, she probed many of the social issues of our day: gender, race, social class, marriage, friendship, and sexuality. She wrote about getting old (“Golden years? You’ve got to be kidding”), about our collective fears of dying, and about her intention to end her own life if illness or frailty made it unbearable – or even sooner.

“Is it affirming life or fearing death that drives us to submit to every indignity of old age, to fight for every breath?” she asked in her blog. Compromising with infirmity was not for her. Nor was the advice of positive thinkers who told her she should look on the bright side. Should was enough to end a friendship.

Lillian was 89 when she first told me of her plans. We were drinking a glass of wine in her San Francisco condominium with a glorious view of the bay and the Golden Gate Bridge.

“You know, I was going to do it earlier this year,” she told me. “I’ve been saving sleeping pills and have quite a stash. But I was afraid. What if it didn’t work? What if I didn’t take enough? What if I threw up? And here I am, about to turn 90. Now what?”

Lillian had written about her intentions – and what she hoped she would have “the courage to do” – in her blog. “Why, at this advanced stage of old age, do I have to add to my anxieties because we have neither social policy nor a culture that permits us to die when we say, ‘I’ve had enough’?” she wrote.

“I ask my doctor to give me a prescription for pills that will make my death easy. He thinks about it, and then with a look I can’t read – sheepishness, regret? – he says, ‘Sorry, I can’t do it.’ I assure him that I don’t plan to take my life immediately; I only want to be in control when it happens, to know I won’t have to leave it to people like him to make a decision that should be mine.”

When she turned 90, Lillian contacted Final Exit Network. She had read about the options beforehand and decided to use helium. After buying the plastic turkey-roasting bag, an athletic band to hold it around her neck, clear plastic tubing and tape, she purchased two small tanks of pure helium online, packed with balloons from a party store. At home she assembled the kit and practiced opening and shutting the valves.

Two Final Exit Network volunteers were with her at the end. The guides had interviewed her earlier to make sure she knew what she was doing, that her daughter would not be taken by surprise, and that everything was ready. And when the time arrived, she did everything right.  She died the way she wanted to, peacefully – even proudly – in her own bed.

Lillian was not ill, at least not terminally, but she was old. She had lived a full and creative life.  But she was no longer the person she used to be, or wanted to be, or wanted her friends and family to see. She was certain about that. “My big question,” she had written, “is only: Will I be able to translate that certainty into action?”

Yes, she was. It was a rebellious and self-affirming act, just the way she planned it.

Still, it might have been better.

Lowrey Brown’s FEN blog of August 22 – “A Chosen Death: The Right to Write Your Own Life’s Story” – popped up on my computer screen with perfect timing, just as I was starting on this epilogue. Three themes struck me as especially relevant to Lillian’s experience.

First is our dependence on the decisions of “professionals of one sort or another” who must deem us sufficiently clear-headed and worthy of their support. Given her advanced age and increasing frailty, Lillian was deeply disappointed by her doctor’s refusal to prescribe a drug that would allow her to decide for herself whether and when to use it. Yes, we need policies and legal protections for clients as well as for professionals who support the right to choose.

Second is the necessity to plan in secret, “whispering goodbye only to their must trusted loved ones (if to anyone).” Lillian shared her final plans with very few. She had found her earlier conversations upsetting. “How can you do this to me?” a friend demanded. “Just don’t tell me the details,” her daughter requested. Yes, we need new understandings and a supportive social framework for those who decide to end their own lives as well as for those who love them.

Third, “It is time for society to create new rituals and new traditions … It is time for proudly and openly planned self-deliverance.” Yes! Lillian would have loved this. She wanted people to know that she had the courage of her convictions. She wanted to celebrate what she called her “Goodbye Day” with a bit of a splash. She had written a dark and funny blog called “I Died Today” to be issued post-mortem, but it didn’t appear.

Of the two obituaries published in national newspapers, one reported only that she died “at her home in San Francisco”; the other that she had a “suicide plan,” but it wasn’t necessary because she died “of natural causes.” Alas, as proud as she was, this would have hurt. It’s not the ending that she wrote for herself.