I spent the week before Easter caring for my mother as she died at her home in Connecticut. She had been diagnosed with lung cancer three and a half years earlier.
My brother, sisters, father and I took shifts at my mother's bedside, moving her to a new position every two hours so she wouldn't get bedsores, giving her morphine when her breathing grew laboured and offering her tiny sips of water whenever she had the strength to swallow. We held her hand, rubbed her back, cried, prayed, read out loud from her favourite books, reminisced about old family stories and told her, over and over, how much we loved her.
My mother was often sleeping during this time, but right up until the end she had moments or hours of clarity when she could speak a few words or communicate non-verbally. Her close friends had the chance to say goodbye and sometimes to receive a smile or a whisper. She died very peacefully on the morning of Good Friday, exactly one week after she had become unable to eat or drink.
This was a deeply personal experience for my family, so intimate that at times, even the visits from the hospice professionals who were assisting us seemed like intrusions into our privacy. I hesitated before writing about it in the public forum of a newspaper column.
I decided to write about my mother's death because, by coincidence, Terry Schiavo lay dying a similar death that same week in a Florida hospice, but in the most public manner imaginable.
I was sickened by the spectacle of the family fights and the political circus surrounding that poor woman, who had been kept alive by a feeding tube for 15 years.
Congressmen, the Florida governor and the president tried to interfere with Schiavo's medical care, using the most inflammatory and inaccurate language describing her dying in torment after being denied food and water.
I was astonished that the death of one woman, in the kind of sad circumstances faced by hundreds of thousands of other families, could become a national political issue. If the U.S. government had been successful in forcing Schiavo's feeding tube to be re-inserted despite her husband's assertion that she would not have wanted it, would people like my mother be next on the list for the "culture of life" lobby?
My mother was 81, and she had lived her life fully. As a long-time hospice volunteer, she knew exactly what to expect under hospice care. She had written a living will years ago saying she wanted no medical interventions to extend her life. She wanted a pain-free and dignified exit from life, and thanks to an excellent home hospice program, that is what she got.
I fear the political rhetoric about Schiavo's death may have discouraged terminally ill people and their families from choosing hospice care. The repeated assertions from politicians that Schiavo would suffer horribly after her feeding tube was removed were medically unfounded. It would be the greatest disservice to the sick if this bizarre political battle were to convince people that a prolonged death while hooked up to invasive medical equipment is somehow more humane than a week of the natural dying process with medical care to relieve discomfort.
Death comes to us all eventually, and hospice care is a wonderful way to meet it.
