The Last Thing My Mother Wanted

May 9, 2024 11:36 AM

Healthy at age 74, she decided there was nothing on earth still keeping her here, not even us.

CW: Suicide

It is September 28, 2022, the day before my mother is scheduled to inject herself with 15 grams of Nembutal — enough to sedate three and a half elephants, the doctor says. She would not need to worry about waking up or being cremated alive. This was a relief to her, Mom says with a smile.

posted by greta simone (80 comments total)

Well, this hits home. CW for some truly terrifying parenting, as well as suicide.
posted by feckless at 11:56 AM on May 9 [5 favorites]

This essay is incredibly heartbreaking and painful in way I didn't expect.

Content warning for likely untreated mental illness and prolonged emotional abuse.
posted by muddgirl at 11:56 AM on May 9 [12 favorites]

Our mom did the same thing in 2021 in her late 70s. Well, we're not upper-class twits who could fly off to Switzerland so it had to be more of a drawn-out process, but the local hospice organization helped us out a lot as she gave up fighting her chronic health conditions.

All her childhood friends had already passed last decade and she figured it was time to go, too.
posted by torokunai at 11:59 AM on May 9 [5 favorites]

This is one of the best essays I've read in a long time. It's only about 4000 words, but what words they are -- not only is it written with enormous depth of feeling and grace and insight and emotional clarity, but the prose is absolutely incredible.

I read this the day it came out, and ever 18 hours or so since then, I've re-read it because it keeps knocking around in my head. I'm so glad that the author has her sister and her husband and her children.
posted by joyceanmachine at 12:11 PM on May 9 [24 favorites]

This is an incredibly complex situation just in theory, made harder by, in this instance, centering around a terribly difficult (and yes, likely mentally ill in some form) person.

I think there is going to be a decades-long discussion/legal battle about who can make this kind of decision and what kind of safeguards/warnings should or will be part of it, and different countries will (already do) have different policies and it's overwhelming to ponder, but at the same time, I have often wondered why I don't (currently) have an easy and legal way to choose my own ending point and just be done with it all in a medical setting, the same way I can see a doctor for any other condition.

Sometimes someone's life is done, even though it isn't over. We don't like to talk about that, and I imagine this will be a difficult conversation here, let alone nation- or world-wide.
posted by tzikeh at 12:12 PM on May 9 [27 favorites]

“The world was going to hell, and she did not want to see more; she did not get joy out of the everyday pleasures of life or her relationships; and she did not want to face the degradations of aging.”

Prediction: This will be commonplace within 10 years.
posted by spudsilo at 12:18 PM on May 9 [41 favorites]

If this is at all accurate, the author's mother sounds like a profoundly selfish and narcissistic person.

I lost my mother ten years ago. And I miss her everyday. Mothers' Day hurts. The holidays are filled with a hollow ache, remembeeing times that will never come back. She struggled to the end to stay with us. Leaving your family because you can't be bothered to live in luxury. I can't imagine the emptiness involves.
posted by The Manwich Horror at 12:22 PM on May 9 [20 favorites]

"I gave her the poem and she gave me my punishment. I would not be going on spring break with her and my sister, I needed to get a job to help pay for the damage, and I wasn’t allowed to say “I love you” to her for three months. I pushed back, telling her I did love her and had just made a mistake, but hit a wall of silence."

I have so much compassion for the author and her sister. I hope, in time, they are able to heal from that horrific childhood and the myriad ways their mother failed them as a parent.

This isn't the story about assisted suicide that you normally read, and I think that's actually a good thing. This is one of the rare stories where I feel like the survivors will, in fact, be better off than the would be had this death been somehow prevented.
posted by anastasiav at 12:23 PM on May 9 [23 favorites]

"her voice animated only when she was describing a plan to smite anyone responsible for a grievance"

This could be about either my mom or my mother-in-law, both of them mid-70's and deep down in a well of disengagement and perpetual grievance. We hear a lot of similar stuff about widowed people in their age cohort.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 12:25 PM on May 9 [8 favorites]

My mother will tell us in Switzerland that, in the hospital, my grandmother was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder. Later, one of my half-sisters will mention that when I was a toddler, my mother told her, outraged, that her doctor had suggested my mother, too, had BPD.

I got about the bit about her cutting off her only sister and thought, "that sounds a lot like BPD".

Having witnessed it up close, it's genuinely terrifying, and will make you question whether it's actually possible to really know anyone in a way that doesn't open you up to deep, scouring trauma. That the author seems to have gone on to have a more normal, healthy family life is very impressive.
posted by ryanshepard at 12:25 PM on May 9 [7 favorites]

Yeah, that was a tough one, but worth it.
posted by malaprohibita at 12:41 PM on May 9 [1 favorite]

spudsilo: “ The world was going to hell, and she did not want to see more; she did not get joy out of the everyday pleasures of life or her relationships; and she did not want to face the degradations of aging.”

Prediction: This will be commonplace within 10 years.

I hope so--anything to move the conversation forward.

The subject of this essay is nigh-impossible to sympathize with, which tilts the conversation, but (and I am not trying to pick on you, Manwich Horror) "leaving your family because--" is approaching the question from the wrong angle. The decision is about the person who chooses to stop living because they are done, not about leaving the people who will miss them. No matter when or how the person dies, they will be leaving the people who will miss them.

If we believe in full bodily autonomy, then we need to accept that this is a part of that autonomy. If I don't own myself, what are we even doing?
posted by tzikeh at 12:48 PM on May 9 [51 favorites]

My mom is 82. She is a widow who devoted her entire adult life to her family, her husband and her two kids, and now that my dad has died and my sister and her two daughters don't visit all that often my mother just seethes sometimes.

I live near her and visit her every day but it is painful because most of the time it is just me listening to her go on about how well she treated her mother and how important family was 'back then' but now nobody does anything for her (except me, which she does sometimes mention).

She is the last of her siblings alive. Most of her friends have passed away. Her best friend, who is about her age, has a similar background (moved to America from Germany) and lost her husband at about the same time my mother did, and they consider themselves to be like sisters but that friend lives a 12 hour drive away and it has become apparent from their phone calls that her friend, who also lives alone, is affected by dementia more and more.

It's rough dealing with her sometimes but I am lucky in that I can live very close to her but separate and she is still able to live alone and can drive herself to her many medical appointments.
posted by Dirk at 12:50 PM on May 9 [11 favorites]

If we believe in full bodily autonomy, then we need to accept that this is a part of that autonomy. If I don't own myself, what are we even doing?

That we should not legally forbid suicide doesn't mean that it is morally neutral or something that can be done in an ethical or unethical way.

My grandfathers both abandoned their families. That was their right. That doesn't mean the choice was beyond criticism.

People should be allowed to cheat on their spouses, abandon their children, and bereave their loves ones because they are bored. But that in no way obligates the rest of us to pretend they aren't selfish jerks for doing so.
posted by The Manwich Horror at 12:54 PM on May 9 [39 favorites]

The price (10,000 CHF) is a bit steep (for me, anyway). Not that I plan on going anywhere soon, but everyone should have a painless, affordable alternative to the many bad ways people are forced to die.
posted by pracowity at 12:58 PM on May 9 [19 favorites]

The subject of this essay is nigh-impossible to sympathize with

I don't know, I find her easy to sympathize with, but I've also had friends and other loved ones with BPD, and while I don't have it myself, I do have emotion-heightening trauma, and experience long-term limerance, so I think I get at least a piece of it.

When you experience romantic love incredibly intensely, the rest of life sometimes seems somewhat flat, somehow. It's not that you don't love the other people in your life, but being with them is not sustaining in the same way. You want them to be happy, you want them to be well, you deeply care about them, but it's just not the same as someone whose voice can make the entire day better.

Now, you still have to be kind to them - you have to work to ensure that you consider their feelings and needs. I would never behave in the way that this woman does to her family. But I understand how after the death of your partner of 25 years, you might feel that the world is somehow missing any joy.

I'm glad I read this article. My daughter worries about me, as someone who feels romantic love intensely - she worries because my partner is in worse physical health than me, and she worries his death will destroy me when it comes. She's not wrong to worry - I feel the fear of his death more than I feel even the fear of my parents dying. That seems sad, but natural and right: his removal, on the other hand, feels like it will create a hole in the world I will struggle to be able to survive.

But I also know that my death one instant earlier than it naturally comes would destroy my daughter, and I love her, and would never want to hurt her, so I think even if I go mad I will never go to suicide, assisted or otherwise. I know my duty to the ones I love. But that's what living would be for me, to live without the person I am in love with, duty, not joy.
posted by corb at 1:04 PM on May 9 [17 favorites]

I dunno, thinking of it from the other side, if someone I loved very much truly, intractably wanted to die, I wouldn't feel very good about forcing them to keep living.

I think that when people have an intractable desire to die, it's not "selfish" the way just fucking off to follow your bliss in Bali or whatever would be - you're going to die. You're not going somewhere to have a better time or more nubile sexual partners or the giddy consciousness of irresponsibility, you're just going to not be. More or less healthy, more or less financially stable people who weigh the burden of consciousness against every single good thing that could possibly happen in the rest of their lives and find that being conscious truly isn't worth it are operating on a level beyond mere selfish choosing. If someone I cared about was that miserable and it seemed very unlikely that they were ever going to get better, I'd hate to keep them around suffering just so that I wouldn't be sad. I wouldn't do that to a pet, nevermind a person.

"You could maybe decide to enjoy life if you could motivate yourself to follow this therapeutic path that I have identified as something I think could work for you even though it's not what you want, and that means your misery is de facto invalid" is not reasoning that is attractive to me when we're talking about an otherwise functional adult.

I'm not saying that it isn't sad and terrible, but to me it's also sad and terrible to force someone to stay alive when they genuinely want to be dead, and forcing that on someone seems more terrible than living with the loss and accepting that at least they have the peace they wanted.
posted by Frowner at 1:08 PM on May 9 [64 favorites]

The Manwich Horror: People should be allowed to cheat on their spouses, abandon their children, and bereave their loves ones because they are bored. But that in no way obligates the rest of us to pretend they aren't selfish jerks for doing so.

Before I respond -- Attention Mods: please note I am not currently suicidal, nor am I experiencing suicidal ideation, nor do I have any plans to kill myself now or in the future.

I take issue with "abandon." If I choose, hypothetically, at some point in the future, to opt out of continuing my life because at that point I experience no joy, no happiness, I am uninterested in everything, and the world has nothing to offer me, would that make me a selfish jerk because my brother and nephew will be sad? Should I, instead, continue to live a life I don't want, that brings me nothing, for no purpose of my own, but rather to postpone their grief over my death until... whenever that would happen later? In what way am I living my life, and not theirs, at that point?

On preview from Frowner: if someone I loved very much truly, intractably wanted to die, I wouldn't feel very good about forcing them to keep living.

Yes, exactly this.
posted by tzikeh at 1:10 PM on May 9 [35 favorites]

Prediction: This will be commonplace within 10 years.

Once again, the Baby Boomers are plowing their way through and breaking the way open for the rest of us.

It was terrible to read about this woman’s life (the daughter’s) and it sounds like the mother didn’t have such a good time either. Oddly, having had a better relationship with my parents I now find myself unworried about the fact that they both have done what they want to do and are perfectly happy to go now. There’s always going to be unfinished business with parents, but absolutely nothing on the scale that this woman needed to work out with her mother. I will be pleased if they find peace.

It is extremely likely that sometime in my 70s I will be taking the same path for medical reasons, and this story reinforces for me one key tenet: I won’t be telling anybody close to me more than a few days before I go. Making people live in anticipation of your death is not a friendly thing to do.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 1:13 PM on May 9 [20 favorites]

“ All the diaries were blank.”
posted by clew at 1:15 PM on May 9 [14 favorites]

I take issue with "abandon." If I choose, hypothetically, at some point in the future, to opt out of continuing my life because at that point I experience no joy, no happiness, I am uninterested in everything, and the world has nothing to offer me, would that make me a selfish jerk because my brother and nephew will be sad?

I can't say whether it would be selfish to choose to end your life in those circumstances. I don't know you or your relationships at all. But when you bring a life into this world or promise to be a parent and guardian to a young child I do feel you create obligations to that person that it is morally wrong to ignore.

I wasn't saying suicide is abandoning your children. I am saying that giving people autonomy means they are permitted to walk away from their families because they prefer to do so. And that we can still think it is a shitty thing to do. We don't have to choose between making suicide a forbidden act and treating every act of suicide as morally neutral. Autonomy means freedom of choice. It also means accepting the responsibility for the choices you make.
posted by The Manwich Horror at 1:22 PM on May 9 [15 favorites]

I think there are a lot of valid point made here, but one thing I come back to is the idea that this is what a person wants.
I wonder if perhaps this is strictly true in enough cases to make a choice to honor that valid.

By this I mean, I have found recently that a couple of the medicines I'm on can make me have suicidal thoughts, if I have certain vitamin deficiencies, also suicidal thoughts, and finally, just because I may have too much iron in my system, you guessed it, suicidal thoughts.

I don't feel that I'm suicidal, so maybe I got lucky...but I bet that if was feeling suicidal, I'd probably have a pretty good rationale worked up in my head as to why I was suicidal. I mean, if you look hard enough, there's a reason for anything and humans can rationalize like nobody's business.

This leads me then to think, OK, but say I went to a doctor and shared my troubles and they glanced through my chart and said, you know, why not knock off a couple of these medications for a month, and here's a b12 shot. Let's talk in a few weeks and see how you're feeling.

Perhaps a few weeks go by and my certainty lessens or my reasons don't seem to compel me as strongly to take action. Did the doctor ignore my wishes? No. Was something undesirable forced on me? Again, no. All the doctor did was take away some factors that could be unduly influencing me. So, in that instance, the doctor was probably right to question what I wanted and propose alternate ideas.

Now, having said all of that, I strongly prefer to err on the side of your body, your choice, but if we go about institutionalizing suicide, I sincerely hope there's a process that involves checking that we're all of sound mind and it's not just buying some "Plan D" over the counter or something like that.
posted by BeReasonable at 1:49 PM on May 9 [13 favorites]

Looks like the subject emotionally abused her children and hurt those close to her for many years. I believe my feelings about a planned assisted suicide in other circumstances would be different to those in a culmination of this abuse and hurt.
posted by grouse at 1:52 PM on May 9 [6 favorites]

I think there are a lot of valid point made here, but one thing I come back to is the idea that this is what a person wants. I wonder if perhaps this is strictly true in enough cases to make a choice to honor that valid.

On the other hand, how long are you willing to second guess someone before you let them die in peace?

And even if they do choose to die and they may have changed their mind later, what makes you believe that it's your business? People make short-sighted choices all the time. What makes it okay for you to interfere in this case?
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 2:04 PM on May 9 [4 favorites]

it's not just buying some "Plan D"

That is black comedy gold right there. Would be perfectly placed in a dystopian SF comedy.
posted by notoriety public at 2:06 PM on May 9 [3 favorites]

I had a parent who attempted suicide multiple times. Never for one moment has it occurred to me to criticise that choice on the grounds that she was trying to selfishly abandon her parental responsibilities.

She had an untreatable mental illness that made her believe that she was a terrible parent, and that we'd be better off without her. Indeed, her behaviour while unwell was distressing and difficult enough that for periods of our childhood we were deliberately separated from her - sadly, we very literally were better off without her during those times and she was very conscious of that.

I don't find any of her behaviour shitty at all. I think she did the best she could with the absolutely rotten hand that she was dealt.

I don't think I ever saw her happier than when she got a terminal diagnosis that meant she finally didn't have to keep on going any more. I'm very glad she's at peace now, as she very rarely was in life.

And I'll not cast aspersions at anyone who makes similar choices, because none of us really knows what it's like to walk in their shoes.
posted by quacks like a duck at 2:12 PM on May 9 [56 favorites]

This is heartbreaking, and I hope that "Evelyn Jouvenet" gained some measure of peace by writing it. Her childhood sounds horrifying.

When I cleaned out my mother-in-law's house after her too-early death, I found her means to suicide near at hand, there just in case she needed it. She had insisted that full autonomy meant retaining this option. I can remember thinking "You were willing to leave us" and also "You always needed to know you had the right to determine your life" and "But you were willing to leave us." One more problem of adult autonomy. There was a possibility that we were not enough to keep her here, and I think about that a lot. Her drive for self-determination co-existed with her love for us, but the balance could have shifted.

I wish the author peace.
posted by MonkeyToes at 2:15 PM on May 9 [4 favorites]

I can remember thinking "You were willing to leave us"

Yeah, both of my parents have (separately) told me directly that they've done everything that they want to do and they're ready to move along whenever. It was a horrible sort of coming of age (at 54) to realize that my parents had done everything they felt important with *me*.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 2:21 PM on May 9 [9 favorites]

would that make me a selfish jerk because my brother and nephew will be sad?

“sadness” does not describe the experiences of the people i know who have had loved ones die by suicide. you can do whatever you want, and you won’t have to be around to watch it, but sometimes people’s lives are destroyed by the suicide of loved ones, and sometimes it puts them at greater risk for suicide themselves. it varies in every case, but the consequences for people you leave behind can be pretty fucking ghastly.
posted by knock my sock and i'll clean your clock at 2:33 PM on May 9 [12 favorites]

She bought an apartment near her childhood home on Fifth Avenue;

One Sunday in late fall, my mother, my sister, and I were on our way back to the city from East Hampton ...

When I was in preschool and my parents were still married and living together on the Upper East Side, ...

Our summers spent as a trio on Long Island — jumping waves, catching crabs in the bay, eating dinner in the backyard before falling asleep in her bed, nut brown and worn out from the sun. ... The school year begins. As I sit by the pool in the evenings watching my children swim, ...

Maybe it's because I just looked at my bank account, but I'm having a really hard time getting past the upper class privilege.
posted by Melismata at 2:38 PM on May 9 [11 favorites]

Precisely how much suffering can a person be reasonably expected to endure for the sake of those who would be saddened, but not materially harmed, by their absence? Can it be quantified? Is there an upper limit?
posted by Faint of Butt at 2:39 PM on May 9 [6 favorites]

No one has to endure anything. That doesn’t mean you get to, or can, calibrate the consequences for other people.
posted by knock my sock and i'll clean your clock at 2:41 PM on May 9 [7 favorites]

Should I, instead, continue to live a life I don't want, that brings me nothing, for no purpose of my own, but rather to postpone their grief over my death until... whenever that would happen later?

One important point here is that when people feel that way, there are, you know, other options to try -- its not "live a joyless life" or "die". That feeling of joylessness can often be a symptom of something that can be treated, and the joy can sometimes be brought back.

What stands out to me most about this story in particular is that the mother never seems to consider any other options. I would hope that someone who genuinely cared about their family and friends might consider therapy, meds, vitamin shots, something else, before they went straight to the Switzerland option.

This is not a story about someone who tried anything else first. This is not a story about someone with no other options. Its framed as a story about assisted suicide, but what actually feels more true to me is that its just the mother's way to demand love and obedience from her daughters one last time - to hold that power over them - before ending her life in a moment of maximum drama.

Its the ultimate narcissistic fantasy - "they will lie next to me in the bed as I die, telling me how much they love me, and then they will weep for me."
posted by anastasiav at 2:41 PM on May 9 [37 favorites]

God this essay hit so close to home. It really captured the intensity and love and dysfunction of the mother-daughter relationship when the mother has BPD. The way abandonment is waved in front of your face as punishment for minor transgressions or mistakes, the way good and downright terrible memories compete when you think about your childhood. All the games that your mother played even through adulthood to get you to feel like you're antagonizing her when she is, in fact, doing it to you.

My mom died from cancer years ago. The regret and relief I felt when she passed is something I'll never forget. Life is peaceful afterwards, and the good memories are still there. I hope the author finds this to be true too.
posted by extramundane at 2:50 PM on May 9 [19 favorites]

Reminds me a bit of "Igby Goes Down," not only for its framing in a lifestyle few of us can imagine. Us poor folks kill ourselves the same way John Lennon would say we were born, into the same saturday night a bottle we were born out of. I don't mean to seem callous, but I am.

My favorite 'resident' at the dementia home I worked for was this poor fellow who retained the ability (curse?) to know how incapacitated and isolated he was. He intermittently hated himself, his nurses, his incapacity, the fact that he knew he would die in the bed he spoke to me from. That is, he would call his nurses terrible names when they force fed him or let him sit in his filth for the better part of a day, but then call them saints the next day, knowing that he was not easy to work with and they were doing their best.

I was maintenance. The best thing I could do was help him work the cell phones which his (also aging) family kept setting up for him, as he could only sometimes work the buttons or remember where the numbers were. I had other patients like him afterwards, but he was the one who forced me to make this decision:

When he told me (again and again): "I just don't want to do this anymore," I didn't lie to him. I told him that the state of his life was objectively rough. That getting up and going outside his room or even to the grounds would make him feel a bit better. That I'd always do my best to connect him with his family and friends, to try and find time to stop by and talk and check in. He taught me how to best use my spare time in that place, by making things a bit more comfortable for the other folks there. I moved on from that job for a host of reasons, but he was emblematic of a cluster thereof. He's probably still alive. I wish he was treated better, or allowed to leave with his dignity.
posted by es_de_bah at 2:50 PM on May 9 [13 favorites]

I have posted this article before, and it fits here. How Not To Commit Suicide by art Kleiner, originally published in CoEvolution Quarterly.

Wanting to die is generally indicative of depression. I am not many years younger, and when I idly wonder if I'm done, it makes me assess my mental health and take action. Nobody has to stay alive for others, but mental illness is a genuine and often treatable thing, and we should make it possible.
posted by theora55 at 3:25 PM on May 9 [6 favorites]

My mom failed to parent in some ways that turned out not to be catastrophic only by chance, and even now I don't think she understands me, but I know she loves me, and this essay is a good opportunity to remember to be grateful for that.

I imagine that the mother here would've been better off in a world where the default expectation was not that she should have kids. (I would not have been like her, but I think that at difficult times I might have potentially been perceived by my theoretical kids as somewhat cold or withholding.) But I suppose that if she had BPD (some of the pieces don't quite seem to fit, and anyway a third-person memoir is not a great basis for diagnosis) she might have decided to have some kids to use as emotional punching-bags anyway.

Maybe it's because I just looked at my bank account, but I'm having a really hard time getting past the upper class privilege.

Wow. Guess the author's mom isn't going to have the monopoly on cruelty here.
posted by praemunire at 3:45 PM on May 9 [9 favorites]

knock my sock and i'll clean your clock: sometimes people’s lives are destroyed by the suicide of loved ones, and sometimes it puts them at greater risk for suicide themselves.

This is true. The problem is there are so many different ways the conversation could go from here so it's difficult to have just one response (e.g. what if they're terminally ill/in constant, agonizing pain/living with treatment-resistant depression that torments them/trapped in a soul-deadening existence that has no hope of improvement but will certainly get worse/just fucking tired of it all and don't want to continue/etc.), but for me it still comes down to: why is someone's desire to stop existing, for any of those reasons or more, less important than the effect it will have on other people?

theora55: Wanting to die is generally indicative of depression.

I would argue that "generally" is an easy way to avoid talking about how there may be many other causes of suicidality, but we don't consider them because we as a species seem to be ill-equipped to talk about suicide dispassionately. It's easy to say a suicidal person must be experiencing depression (or some other mental illness) because that's always been the answer, but I think most people don't want to consider that there might be reasons unrelated to illness, mental or otherwise, for wanting to stop living. And I think this is part of what I'm trying to say in the first paragraph, and why it's so hard to talk about, because so much suicide does come about from mental illness so that is the main experience of it that people have -- but like anything that has been taboo to discuss, once we start discussing it, I'll bet we find many, many more people who are not clinically depressed who have seriously considered killing themselves because they're finished, but their body forces them to keep going -- and it isn't that they haven't considered the other people in their lives.
posted by tzikeh at 4:14 PM on May 9 [11 favorites]

tzikeh, I have experienced clinical depression for much of my life. Suicidal ideation will come out of the blue, and it means I need to check my meds. Yes, there are many reasons to not want to live, but we are hardwired to survive. If people are depressed because the economy is predatory, or because they're being bullied, or they can't afford care for their illness, those are good, also solvable, reasons. Humans are social mammals, and connections with others are critical. I defend the right to controlling one's life, but I do believe it's a form ol illness most of the time.

I'm very concerned that old people will be pressured to stop living because they are seen as an economic burden. We should have the right to autonomy, but not the pressure to end our lives.
posted by theora55 at 5:04 PM on May 9 [6 favorites]

If people are depressed because the economy is predatory, or because they're being bullied, or they can't afford care for their illness

I don't think it's a sign of mental illness to be ground down by relentless discomfort (if you're indulging in the illusion that all medically-related suffering can be addressed by treatment, time to let that one go), a constant diminishment of one's capacity that robs one of the ability to do things one enjoys, and the steady erosion of one's social world through the loss of long-standing relationships, all of which are common concomitants of old age. To act like these can simply be addressed by more resources for everyone is to indulge in that strange irrational leftist counter-optimism that's founded on the idea that all problems are already solved and what's lacking is money and will.

we are hardwired to survive

This is a fiction that seems to have arisen from a bizarre misunderstanding of Darwinism, but, even if it were...so what?
posted by praemunire at 5:24 PM on May 9 [26 favorites]

but we are hardwired to survive

Actually we’re hardwired to die. Happens to everyone.

And before that we are hardwired to assist in passing along the family genes, whether directly or as part of a support system. And quite a few people have sacrificed their own lives to do that over the years.

So no, we are not hardwired to survive.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 5:35 PM on May 9 [5 favorites]

This hits too close to home for me to really comment on.

I just hope that if I have to make this decision, I can. Going to keep fighting, but, sometimes, you don't win...

Though I survived 3 days in the ICU and 3 more weeks in the hospital. So I've got that going for me...

I'm a fraidy-cat though. Can't imagine ending it. My dogs would be sad.
posted by Windopaene at 5:39 PM on May 9 [4 favorites]

if no one cares im dead
or even knows
guess i win
posted by Rev. Irreverent Revenant at 5:49 PM on May 9 [6 favorites]

Hardwiring is overselling it. If anything, humanity excels at hotwiring ourselves. Doing shit that is way out of specification. (Or even speciesfication!)

But honestly, as a lifelong sufferer from depression, I am mightily sick of being thrown under the bus. Better that unhappy people be forced to live a long life that they hate, otherwise someone somewhere might be pressured to check out early.

I mean, I get it, I understand why that’s the decision that society has made. But I deeply resent it. Still putting up with it so far. Gets a little bit harder every year though.
posted by notoriety public at 5:52 PM on May 9 [18 favorites]

Wow. Guess the author's mom isn't going to have the monopoly on cruelty here.

I don't think it is cruelty.

It is an admitted failure of empathy, but nobody wants the author to suffer. It can just be hard to properly envision a more abstract, emotional kind of suffering when you both aren't experiencing it currently, and are experiencing much more concrete threats to your continued existence.

I miss my Mom everyday, but the guy on the offramp flying a sign is probably to tired to and scared to commiserate with me.
posted by The Manwich Horror at 6:03 PM on May 9 [1 favorite]

we are hardwired to survive

This is a fiction that seems to have arisen from a bizarre misunderstanding of Darwinism, but, even if it were...so what?

Her mother was well past child bearing years, evolution is selecting for her survival at this point.
posted by waving at 6:11 PM on May 9

No, I think a pointed and public refusal to extend sympathy to someone who's clearly had a very bad lifelong experience through no fault of her own and has just lost a parent because some members of that person's family are or were wealthy constitutes a form of cruelty. I don't stay up nights fretting over the sufferings of the rich as they try to coordinate nanny schedules or grieving over Sam Bankman-Fried's inability to be in the group slack with his friends anymore, but it is unkind and frankly fucking bizarre to treat having a sadistic parent who just took her own life in a manner clearly designed to inflict maximum suffering on her kids as some kind of first-world problem you refuse to engage with because the person's mom owns a property in the Hamptons.
posted by praemunire at 6:15 PM on May 9 [8 favorites]

theora55: I have experienced clinical depression for much of my life. Suicidal ideation will come out of the blue, and it means I need to check my meds.

I have lived with clinical depression for all of my 55 years, along with crippling anxiety. I have been on every med and combo of meds out there. I am intimately familiar with the full range of depression's gifts, from anhedonia to suicidal ideation and everything in between, the constant calibration of meds, exercise, sleep, nutrition, and everything that comes with it. I have had many psychologists / psychiatrists / psychopharmacologists / therapists / social workers. I am currently in therapy. I have experienced suicidal ideation (though never have had an active plan) several times when in depressive episodes. But the times I am most thoughtful about suicide come when I am not experiencing that -- the times when I can say look back at a period of depression that has lifted, examine my mental-illness-induced thoughts, recognize them for what they were, and then think about them from a stable and balanced place.

I was really hoping we weren't going to whip out and measure our personal experiences with mental health during this discussion because 1) it is only in service of "I know more about this than you because I have *suffered* and you have not" garbage; 2) it's nobody's fucking business; and 3) now anything I have contributed to this conversation is indelibly tainted with "OHHHHH, so she's MENTALLY ILLLLLLLLLLLL! It's the DEPRESSSSSSIONNNNN TALKINNNNNNNG," and so all of my opinions can be hand-waved away as Incorrect By Default by people who don't understand depression and I am reduced to a diagnosis instead of a fully formed human being with critical-thinking skills who lives a life that is much more than a diagnosis.
posted by tzikeh at 6:43 PM on May 9 [31 favorites]

.
posted by Didnt_do_enough at 7:34 PM on May 9

No, I think a pointed and public refusal to extend sympathy to someone who's clearly had a very bad lifelong experience through no fault of her own and has just lost a parent because some members of that person's family are or were wealthy constitutes a form of cruelty.

I didn't read the original comment as a refusal but rather as a statement that they couldn't connect at a human level with something that was happening to someone in a difference economic class.

That sort of thing is bog solid Metafilter. There are a large number of people here who are unable to encounter people outside of their economic class -- both richer and poorer -- as fully human.

It's a quirk of the place.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 8:00 PM on May 9 [6 favorites]

“sadness” does not describe the experiences of the people i know who have had loved ones die by suicide

This bears repeating.

Taking death out of the picture — If you just stopped communicating with everyone you knew one day there would be a lot of hurt feelings. If you stated very clearly that there was no chance of you ever reconnecting with them, it would be a lot worse. People would feel like you were rejecting them and a lot of people take rejection hard.

As my mother (who is both a therapist, and someone who has worked in hospice) put it: “People who lose their parents can feel orphaned. People whose parents commit suicide can feel disowned.”
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 8:37 PM on May 9 [6 favorites]

That sort of thing is bog solid Metafilter. There are a large number of people here who are unable to encounter people outside of their economic class -- both richer and poorer -- as fully human.

Well, part of the deal in my particular experience that I'm bringing to this situation is that the US health system kinda failed my mom and we didn't have the six or seven figure sum in cash required to throw at a chance of restoring quality of life like going to those weirdo health clinics in places like Switzerland that try goofy medical practices that allegedly turn chronic health conditions around.

https://www.businessinsider.com/steve-jobs-went-to-switzerland-for-unusual-radiological-treatment-in-2009-2011-1

Part of the story in the FPP is this person apparently had sufficient resources such that there wasn't anything left to do on her bucket list . . . and growing old with her family didn't seem all that worth it.

Arcs like this are made for a movie I guess.

We all pachinko-ball our way through life.
posted by torokunai at 9:06 PM on May 9 [6 favorites]

Wow. Guess the author's mom isn't going to have the monopoly on cruelty here.

Honestly, I think your comment is meaner than the one you responded to. If someone wants to indulge in a little self-pity on an obscure web site, that's not even Baltic Avenue on the Monopoly board of cruelty.
posted by betweenthebars at 9:41 PM on May 9 [11 favorites]

I usually hate it when people do this, but I will admit that I want to know how much the Cut fact-checked this essay, because some of the details feel like they come from various fictional depictions of rich-people trauma. And I've known some rich people, some of whom have a fair amount of trauma in their backgrounds, but I still wondered about the freak house fire that killed the author's father's first wife and child, as well as the thing where her grandparents abandoned her mother with a Swedish nanny to sail around the world. Really? A Swedish nanny? To sail around the world? I'm kind of wondering if she changed some details to maintain her anonymity, and she changed them to things that sound like they come from not-great novels.

Anyway, this essay made me very angry at the author's mother, which makes sense, because I think the author is very angry at her mother. And that's fair enough, because she sounds like she was an awful mother, but I'm not sure it illuminated anything about assisted dying for me. If it's available to everyone, then all sorts of people will use it for all sorts or reasons, and narcissistic people may use it in part to manipulate and torment their children. But you can't outlaw everything that a bad parent will use to hurt their kids, so I'm not sure what that really adds to the discussion.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 9:42 PM on May 9 [8 favorites]

Part of the documentary Terry Pratchett: Choosing to Die involves another Swiss organization offering assisted suicide. You see the entire process, both the death itself but also the emotional process of living people dealing with saying good bye.
posted by munchingzombie at 10:10 PM on May 9 [3 favorites]

Another good examination is the novel, "Mayflies" by Andrew O'Hagan, which culminates in a similar Swiss solution.

I generally view suicide as a selfish action. There are so many things that NEED to be done, and someone who has the ability and resources to make a difference by doing some of those things, instead opts out.

The mother was a well-off New Yorker, whose presence, let alone assistance, would have bolstered any number of organisations and charities. My nearly 90 year old mother is still writing letters of objection to developments, organising the neighbours to make submissions for an appeal to the planning tribunal and engaging with the mundane bureaucracy of local government. She has been feeling fragile as the only surviving sibling, but is lifting her spirits with her plans for her 90th.
posted by Barbara Spitzer at 10:55 PM on May 9

I used to think suicide might be selfish, but now I know quite a few people who killed themselves.
And I have realised that I don't get to decide for another person whether or not their suffering is bearable. They get to decide that, based on their experience, which I can never know.
posted by Zumbador at 12:52 AM on May 10 [20 favorites]

The depictions of parenting in this essay were gutting. Especially the mother telling the sister she was killing herself because the sister didn’t love her enough. Absolutely horrific and familiar.

My MIL, after having Covid, was contemplating similar. She was open to explore other things though and so she got on anti depressants and is now working on some really amazing art pieces in polymer clay, going to aquafit, loving on my/our 1 year old puppy, and visiting her grandkids.
posted by warriorqueen at 3:45 AM on May 10 [3 favorites]

I agree with your assessment that some details may have been fictionalized, ArbitraryAndCapricious. “At 16, my mother took me on a trip to India to celebrate our relationship and then I had to watch her have lesbian sex in our tent” seems a bit twee.
posted by Melismata at 5:09 AM on May 10

Paywall-free link

That was quite a read. Narcissism is so awful. I have some empathy for the mom (what kind of gnawing emptiness would have to be inside you to treat people that way, and in the end to not even be able to take pleasure in anything anymore) but mostly for her daughters. To have to give their mom this peaceful death while getting no solace from her in return.
posted by signsofrain at 5:23 AM on May 10 [2 favorites]

The trouble is, when someone is set on suicide - really set on it, over time, in the face of at least some plausible possibility of life changes or treatment - by definition they're not able to think "my life is virtually unbearable but I will suck it up for my family or my political causes".

It's like any other serious health problem. For instance, I am not able to suck it up and go hike the Appalachian Trail despite the spinal stenosis. It's not selfishness that makes hiking impossible, it is the literal state of my spine. Long walks used to be something I did regularly with friends and family, and not being able to do them is a real loss, but I have early onset spinal stenosis, PT only gets you so far and the doctors do not believe that surgery would be more restorative than PT, so it's just something that I've lost.

I think the "you could get better if you just tried harder" narrative has lost at least some of its grip on our culture for physical illness, but we feel very comfortable assuming that mental illness and other kinds of misery are things that everyone can and should overcome, and that failure to do so is a personal choice, like someone who is literally killing themselves is resistant to therapy in the same way that a teenager might be resistant to therapy for some relatively small school issue.

The people who can suck it up and carry on for their families generally do - there are lots of people who do this.

We're not talking about someone who is leaving young children or leaving children with no one else around them, or leaving their children in poverty. Whatever bad and chaotic life this woman led, she did definitely stick around until her kids were successful on their own. At some point, the child's claims on the parent have to be admitted to attenuate a bit.
posted by Frowner at 5:36 AM on May 10 [18 favorites]

“People who lose their parents can feel orphaned. People whose parents commit suicide can feel disowned.”

I interpret this as a suggestion that anyone likely to choose to end their life should refrain from having children, and I can support that because I don't think anyone should be having children.
posted by Faint of Butt at 5:37 AM on May 10 [3 favorites]

but for me it still comes down to: why is someone's desire to stop existing, for any of those reasons or more, less important than the effect it will have on other people?

I didn’t say this, or that this person’s mother shouldn’t have done this. i said that you can’t avoid consequences for other people. that’s true for everything, but it’s especially so for suicide. the problem of living—and, I guess, dying— is precisely this.

i interpret this as a suggestion that anyone likely to choose to end their life should refrain from having children, and I can support that because I don't think anyone should be having children

a lot of people don’t choose to end their lives til they’ve gotten there, so … sure. that … seems solid.
posted by knock my sock and i'll clean your clock at 6:13 AM on May 10

My relationship with my mother was complicated. She died of a stroke back in 2020, but she'd lived for the last third of her life (25 years) with Wegener's granulomatosis in a state of continually degrading health. Her quality of life for much of that time was terrible and she spoke to me of suicide on several occasions. Even before her diagnosis she could be difficult to deal with, mercurial, petty, and vindictive. But after multiple rounds of chemotherapy and steroids, she became much worse. I think, that if she had known about it, this might have been her decision as well. Though I don't think she'd have had people surrounding her, telling her that she was loved as she faded away. She'd thoroughly alienated her daughter (my only sibling), her oldest grandchildren, her brother, and my father has never been particularly demonstrative of his affection. I loved her and I would probably would have accompanied her if she'd asked, but I suspect I'd have been the only one there.
posted by Majestic Tuna Can at 7:08 AM on May 10 [2 favorites]

Some of the family dynamics in this essay were unpleasantly familiar. My role in the family unit was/is to be dutiful and successful and present. And please not too weird. It's certainly not the sort of family where we get to voice opinions about parents' life choices.

But at least my parents weren't actively sadistic. This essay is fantastic and what it describes is awful. I cannot imagine dancing attendance for a full week like that, hoping for some final reconciliation or reckoning or change of heart.
posted by mersen at 7:38 AM on May 10 [5 favorites]

I am in my 40s. Healthy, happy, child-free and single but with a dear chosen family.

I also have very little savings after 20 years of working, and don't have high expectations that I'll have much in another 20 years (I'll never be able to own a home).

It's not unlikely that I'll enter my 70s and upward still having to work to just survive, with no one to 'take care' of me because, unless they are lucky, a lot of my closest people will also be in similar positions. When my health starts to decline past a point of no return and I start losing the people I love, not sure what else I'll really have to hold on to or look forward to.

I often think 'well, if it gets to a point where I'm miserable, I'll just peace out on my own terms' which honestly gives me a great deal of comfort. I've talked about it with a few of my close friends, some of whom are in similar positions, and we're all like 'oh fuck yeah we're dunzo soon as we're good and ready to be'. I don't want to stick around and just watch things get worse for me.

Is it sad that we live in an economic and political climate (in the US at least) where we're pretty sure there won't be good systems in place to support us when we're old? Sure. Does that mean we should have to grin and bear it? Nah. Does that mean I'm depressed and should seek medical help? I really don't think so, I'm just an intensely practical person.

I watched so many of my older relatives just wait out their final years in utter physical and/or emotional misery, literally wishing for death to anyone who will listen. It's heartbreaking, and when they finally passed I've truly felt nothing but relief for them to be at peace. I want to be able to make a graceful exit long before I get to that point.

I do sincerely hope in the decades to come that the dying-with-dignity movement allows for this option to be more available. In the meantime, I'll save up for the Pegasos option. The idea of the end being in a fancy hotel in Switzerland sounds pretty good to me vs most of the realistic alternatives.
posted by greta simone at 7:44 AM on May 10 [20 favorites]

And that's fair enough, because she sounds like she was an awful mother, but I'm not sure it illuminated anything about assisted dying for me.

I think it's interesting precisely because it shows what the experience can still be like (and what ethical issues arise) when (a) obviously the person choosing to die can find nothing worthwhile to live for in her own life beyond a last grand gesture of torturing her kids and (b) the kids themselves are probably better off without her, though they haven't been able to bring themselves to acknowledge it to themselves. I have a friend whose mother (fortunately, a far kinder person, but still somewhat emotionally remote from her kids/the world) was discussing taking a MAID option last year, though she ultimately rejected it, and it cast some light for me.

The mother was a well-off New Yorker, whose presence, let alone assistance, would have bolstered any number of organisations and charities.

I just don't feel that I have the capacity to demand that someone who finds no joy in life go on living til they reach a natural death because they might make a 0.0001% contribution towards even a cause close to my heart like animal rescue in the meantime. I agree that the issues become more complicated (to the extent that it is a matter of ethical analysis, as opposed to the frantic jump from a perceived burning building it so often is) when you have dependents who need you to survive, but this woman's kids were clearly independent adults. If you want to close your account with humanity at 70, I think you can.
posted by praemunire at 7:56 AM on May 10 [6 favorites]

>fancy hotel in Switzerland

mom's after-hospital care in the normal no-frills skilled nursing facility was $300/night.

Medicare only allows you 3 weeks of this at a time, or something like that.
posted by torokunai at 7:58 AM on May 10

“People who lose their parents can feel orphaned. People whose parents commit suicide can feel disowned.”

I interpret this as a suggestion that anyone likely to choose to end their life should refrain from having children

Nah, just that as this gets more common we should prepare for potential consequences. It would be a lot healthier if adult children become aware that their parent’s obligation to them has ended. We could even have a coming of age party when people turn 50.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 8:51 AM on May 10 [5 favorites]

I usually hate it when people do this, but I will admit that I want to know how much the Cut fact-checked this essay, because some of the details feel like they come from various fictional depictions of rich-people trauma.

For whatever reason the other night, I did a deep-internet dive into Leila Hadley Luce (CW: sexual and emotional abuse of minor children) and this story hits many of the same notes, if somewhat less horrific. I don't think it's absurd to suggest that the children of rich parents are not immune from those parents' health issues and family traumas just because they are born into wealth.
posted by oneirodynia at 12:17 PM on May 10 [2 favorites]

I don't think it's absurd to suggest that the children of rich parents are not immune from those parents' health issues and family traumas just because they are born into wealth.

I suspect that children of wealthy parents, statistically, may be even more likely to suffer from this sort of trauma, because their parents have the power to isolate them from healthy society. This is not a reason to pity the rich, of course; it's a reason to take their money away until there are no more rich people.
posted by Faint of Butt at 3:10 PM on May 10 [7 favorites]

Normally, I would suggest raising everyone else’s standard of living, but obviously that’s not going to work in this case. In fact, we need to place limits on society’s prosperity as a whole so that no one can afford to put their children in unhealthy situations.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 4:02 PM on May 10

This might be spoilers for an old movie, but one of the key plot points of Until the End of the World is a device that records the brain activity of seeing things, invented by a scientist who hopes to help his wife, blind since childhood, to see again. There's a lot more going on in the film, but that particular plot point is resolved about halfway through the movie, when, upon receiving the device loaded with her son's recordings of friends and family across the world, she essentially recoils from it, and dies of grief, distraught at how ugly the world had become since she was a child, how polluted and degraded everything was compared to her memories.

More than anything else from the film (and it's a big film, with a lot of perfect moments), that's stuck with me, and immediately came to mind when reading this.
posted by Ghidorah at 4:31 PM on May 10 [5 favorites]

"In Love: A Memoir of Love and Loss" by Amy Bloom, tells a story that is similar in its broad outlines, and it is fascinating to see how the two authors react. In Bloom's memoir her husband does have a terminal illness, though not one that would result in death quickly enough for a U.S. state to allow medical aid in dying. The facts of the two parties who end their own lives are essentially the same, saying goodbye stateside, a short period in Switzerland, and then calm death in a warehouse. And yet for Bloom it seems like a loving act of care, while "Jouvenet" resents it.

I don't have a comment on what any of the parties involved "should" have done, because the circumstances are too extreme for me to really know what I would do. I was shaken up and grieving (please pardon me for this reference) when our 18-year-old cat was definitely ready to die, and that's, to borrow a phrase, just peanuts compared to a parent or partner.

A 74-year-old woman has a 13 year average life expectancy, that's a long time, for good or ill. She has only a 1 in 25 chance of dying that year. For someone who has lost a longtime partner several years ago, and then planned for three months to die, I can't look at that decision and say it was hasty. Even if it was motivated in part by textbook depressive symptoms like anhedonia.

My own father lived an extremely independent lifestyle until he was literally forced to move into a nursing home. (Like, I flew across the country on short notice to explain to him that the skilled nursing rehab facility would literally not be able to let him leave and go back to his apartment, so a facility was the only option.) He's really, really unhappy there. His most repeated phrase is, "Life is a three act play, with a bad third act." When we tell him about things we've been doing, he keenly feels his own inability to leave his room without help. Is it really the kind thing to keep him alive? I did gently bring up the subject of an assisted suicide with him and he definitely wasn't interested, so clearly not everyone who is older and unhappy with their lives is going to choose that option.

For me, I definitely want to live for a long time. There is no financial reason why I would want to end my life. But once my offspring are grown, I don't want to be put on a ventilator. I would much rather die at 74 with my faculties mostly intact than live to 84 at the cost of losing the ability to make choices. I hope my offspring and partner don't feel like I abandoned them if it comes to that, but possibly they will. Being weird about death is so universal that it's not even a human phenomenon, Neanderthals and even earlier hominids clearly had death rituals. This essay has made me think about what and when to tell various people, though.

I was planning to make my wishes very clearly known now, hopefully decades before I would be in the situation. But that carries the risk of prolonging the anticipation of my death. Maybe it's better to put things down in writing now but not tell anyone. How long do you really need to say goodbye to a parent? Three months seems like a long time to hold someone in painful limbo.
posted by wnissen at 5:21 PM on May 10 [2 favorites]

Along the same lines: Why I Hope To Die at 75 (2014), by Ezekiel Emanuel. He's opposed to assisted suicide; his plan is basically to refuse medical treatment after 75.

Doubtless, death is a loss. It deprives us of experiences and milestones, of time spent with our spouse and children. In short, it deprives us of all the things we value.

But here is a simple truth that many of us seem to resist: living too long is also a loss. It renders many of us, if not disabled, then faltering and declining, a state that may not be worse than death but is nonetheless deprived. It robs us of our creativity and ability to contribute to work, society, the world. It transforms how people experience us, relate to us, and, most important, remember us. We are no longer remembered as vibrant and engaged but as feeble, ineffectual, even pathetic.

By the time I reach 75, I will have lived a complete life. I will have loved and been loved. My children will be grown and in the midst of their own rich lives. I will have seen my grandchildren born and beginning their lives. I will have pursued my life’s projects and made whatever contributions, important or not, I am going to make. And hopefully, I will not have too many mental and physical limitations. Dying at 75 will not be a tragedy. Indeed, I plan to have my memorial service before I die. And I don’t want any crying or wailing, but a warm gathering filled with fun reminiscences, stories of my awkwardness, and celebrations of a good life. After I die, my survivors can have their own memorial service if they want—that is not my business.

I thought this was particularly interesting:

Unless there has been terrible abuse, no child wants his or her parents to die. It is a huge loss at any age. It creates a tremendous, unfillable hole. But parents also cast a big shadow for most children. Whether estranged, disengaged, or deeply loving, they set expectations, render judgments, impose their opinions, interfere, and are generally a looming presence for even adult children. This can be wonderful. It can be annoying. It can be destructive. But it is inescapable as long as the parent is alive. Examples abound in life and literature: Lear, the quintessential Jewish mother, the Tiger Mom. And while children can never fully escape this weight even after a parent dies, there is much less pressure to conform to parental expectations and demands after they are gone.

Living parents also occupy the role of head of the family. They make it hard for grown children to become the patriarch or matriarch. When parents routinely live to 95, children must caretake into their own retirement. That doesn’t leave them much time on their own—and it is all old age. When parents live to 75, children have had the joys of a rich relationship with their parents, but also have enough time for their own lives, out of their parents’ shadows.

posted by russilwvong at 5:47 PM on May 10 [6 favorites]

"... its just the mother's way to demand love and obedience from her daughters one last time..."

Yes, anastasiav, that's how I read it too. The closing question - "How could she leave you?" - seemed to be at the heart of what the author was trying to understand. And I guess in a loving family that might be a relevant question. But I was thinking, "Why are you giving her so much power over your life? Why are you tormenting yourself with the expectation of love, when she's shown you over and over again that she doesn't really have much to give you?"

I wrote this some days ago but didn't post it, and russilwvong and wnissen have now perhaps covered this territory better, but I just read Knocking on Heaven's Door, the Path to a Better Way of Death, and The Art of Dying Well: A Practical Guide to a Good End of Life, both by Katy Butler, written after the deaths of her parents in succession. The choice her mother made, at a similar age to the author's mother, to refuse even simple treatment that could have given her many more years of life, seems to have derived from having been the primary carer for her husband through an awful decline over 5 long years, a decline prolonged by a pacemaker that kept his heart beating long after it might have given out naturally. The way she went about it was not the same as the author's mother but the outcome was the same - a death earlier than others maybe wanted or expected. But Butler looks at her mother's decision to die in a totally different way - despite her pain at losing her mother early (and their relationship was not straightforward either), she seems to understand and respect her mother's decision. Part of dying well, Butler argues, is knowing when to go.

And - hearing about Steve Albini's death, I did have a tiny thought of: What a way to go! In his studio, at the controls, doing what he loved, in the midst of what appears to have been a satisfying and productive life, before any cognitive decline, and with an incredible body of work left behind. Many (most?) people don't get that, out of life.
posted by happyfrog at 11:19 PM on May 10 [4 favorites]

While I believe in the right of every person to decide for themselves when their life should end, we live in a society that's deeply abelist, and many of us automatically equate being [ alive and not productive] , with being useless / pointless / pitiful.

It's worth pushing back against those thoughts in myself. I think that other living things have the right to simply exist - I don't look at a tree or a fish or a cat or a frog and think it's value comes purely because it's useful, or contributes in some way.

I'm trying to think about myself in that way too. So maybe I'll get old, and just exist, no longer earn more, or write, or draw, and even be "a burden" because I'll depend on others.

But that's OK. I'll still be just as valid and worthy of life as a tree.
posted by Zumbador at 1:00 AM on May 11 [7 favorites]

frankly fucking bizarre to treat having a sadistic parent who just took her own life in a manner clearly designed to inflict maximum suffering on her kids as some kind of first-world problem you refuse to engage with because the person's mom owns a property in the Hamptons.

Lbr, this entire situation would not be happening without class privilege. If the mother did not have the funding to go to Switzerland, this story would be completely different and not about “assisted” suicide in any way. The author would not be next to her mother as she died, she would be finding said mother bleeding out in a bathtub. It would be a horror show… but an entirely different horror show. So, no, I don’t think bringing class privilege into this is out of place.
posted by sonika at 5:38 PM on May 11 [5 favorites]

When my grandmother died, my mother went through her apartment, searching for clues as to her personality, or perhaps some proof that her mother had loved and cherished her, and found a series of locked diaries dating back years. Hours later, she found the keys and was full of anticipation. All the diaries were blank.

This stopped me in my tracks. My god. What a metaphor. I'm sitting in my living room right now, my 90 year old mother napping beside me, and boy do I feel like I have received a bunch of blank diaries from her over the course of our lives. And now it's too late, really, for the questions I could never bring myself to ask her. Damn.
posted by jokeefe at 1:27 PM on May 12 [1 favorite]

I could write reams here.

My dad started preparing me for his death, oh, probably fifteen years ago. At first I didn't want to hear it, but he and I agreed on end of life at our own terms, and so I listened to his terms. At the time, his plan for dealing with a terminal diagnosis involved his truck and a bridge abutment. I was obviously resistant about that, telling him I'd rather he moved to a state with assisted suicide, but he didn't want to leave the area where I live.

Then he, at 71, fell in love and got married. And when a couple years later the cancer diagnosis came, he called me. Voice fogged with tears, he said, "I don't want to leave her." And so I told him to fight. And told his wife that when he got too much, I would come and help.

He may not have wanted to die, but he sure as hell wasn't gonna do anything to make prolonging his life easier for anybody, so I up and moved three states, into his house, within a few months. Between the cancer and the COPD, and the new diabetes the treatments had given him, my ADHD stepmother couldn't even keep his meds straight, and he'd do for me things he wouldn't do for her (poor woman got the brunt of him having been abused by my FBP -female biological parent).

But even for me, he wouldn't cooperate long. He hated the cancer treatments, hated pt from the fall that triggered his wife to call for me to come, hated the dietary changes forced by the diabetes. He was furious at the limits of his body, raging at the world and anybody in reach when he felt particularly out of control. Sometimes he talked about the bridge again.

He decided to stop treatment and go into hospice home care after I'd been there for three months, and died five months later.

I've posted elsewhere on metafilter bits and pieces about my physical health. You mainly need to know I've been in unceasing pain from a spinal injury since 1993, and have nerve damage and migraines from brain damage and other injuries in childhood. While I was caring for Dad, he'd look at me sometimes, eyes watering, and ask me how I stand it. How I was still alive. And my answer was that I had been waiting for him to die so I could, but I'd since quite stupidly allowed some people to love me, so I was trying to stay alive for them, too. He'd chuckle, as I intended, but he also would squeeze my hand as hard as he could because he knew I meant every word.


I was raised and abused by a mother with BPD. And while this woman in TFA sounds a lot less violent than my FBP, some of the other patterns ring really true. I really recommend to people who might have been raised by BPD moms the book "Understanding the Borderline Mother: Helping Her Children Transcend the Intense, Unpredictable, and Volatile Relationship" by Christine Lawson. The book outlines four major clusters of behaviors seen in mothers with BPD. You'd recognize this woman in the pages of that book.

In a way, my FBP did me a solid - she was so extreme in her abuse that I could "justify" walking away entirely. I got Dad out too, years later. But the writer of this essay never got away. And as self centered and manipulative as the writer's mother was, that need for control spared her daughters the task of caring for her. I honestly suspect that the woman couldn't tolerate the idea of being helpless, in the control of others, especially if she'd watched her partner go through it.

I have been diagnosed with BPD, to be fully transparent. I certainly don't like sharing a diagnosis with the person who did the damage that caused the disorder, but there we are. I wanted to be clear that having BPD doesn't have to mean you are abusive. It means you have to be wary of your potential for it.


As far as assisted suicide goes, I'm in favor. I want that option. I have been suicidal for 42 years now. A good day is one in which I only think about longing for death a few times. But like I told my dad, I've allowed people to love me, and I'll stay here as long as I can for them.

But someday I will probably lose this fight, and I'd like not to have to steal my own life. I'd like to able to walk or wheel into a clean, orderly place and end my pain with an utter lack of pain, and leave my beloveds with no mess to clean up, no body to explain to anybody.
posted by Vigilant at 11:51 PM on May 14 [12 favorites]