Dying - Cory Taylor

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to me to ask why. I wonder, for instance, if our laws reflect some deep aversion amongst medical professionals here towards the idea of relinquishing control of the dying process into the hands of the patient. I wonder if this aversion might stem from a more general belief in the medical profession that death represents a form of failure. And I wonder if this belief hasn’t seeped out into the wider world in the form of an aversion to the subject of death per se, as if the stark facts of mortality can be banished from our consciousness altogether.

      Surely there couldn’t be a more futile exercise, for if cancer teaches you one thing, it is that we are dying in our droves, all the time. Just go into the oncology department of any major hospital and sit in the packed waiting room. All around you are people dying. See most of them on the street, and you’d never know it, but here they are lined up, waiting for the latest results of their scans, to discover if they’ve beaten the odds this month. It’s a shocking sight if you’re unused to it. I was as under-prepared as anyone could be. It was as if I had stumbled out of a land of make-believe into the realm of the real.

      That is why I started writing this book. Things are not as they should be. For so many of us, death has become the unmentionable thing, a monstrous silence. But this is no help to the dying, who are probably lonelier now than they’ve ever been. At least that is how it feels to me.

      °

      I had never seen anybody die. Until my mother became demented I had never even seen anyone gravely ill. My mother’s decline was slow at first, and then very fast. Towards the end she was barely recognisable as the mother I had so loved and admired. I was out of the country when she finally died, but I was there in the months preceding her death and I saw the ravages she suffered, the pain and humiliation, the loss of independence and reason.

      She was in a nursing home when she died, a place of such unremitting despair it was a test of my willpower just to walk through the front door. The last time I saw her, I stood helplessly by while she had her arse wiped clean by a young Japanese nurse. My mother was clinging onto a bathroom basin with all of her meagre strength, while the nurse applied a fresh nappy to her withered behind. The look in my mother’s eyes as she turned and saw me watching reminded me of an animal in unspeakable torment. At that moment I wished for death to take her quickly, to stop the torture that had become her daily life. But still it went on, for a dozen more months, her body persisting while her mind had long since vacated the premises. I could not think of anything more cruel and unnecessary. I knew I had cancer by then, and a part of me was grateful. At least I would be spared a death like my mother’s, I reasoned. That was something to celebrate.

      It was my mother who introduced me to the debate around assisted dying. She first came across the voluntary euthanasia movement, as it was then known, some time in her sixties, and I knew it was a cause she continued to support, because she made a point of telling me. Back then I took far less notice than I should have. My mother was asking me for help, but it wasn’t clear what kind of help she wanted. Perhaps just a bit of encouragement to look into the problem more closely, to obtain the necessary means if it came to that. I wasn’t very receptive. In those days there was nothing wrong with my mother, or with me, so her arguments in support of the concept of assisted dying were purely academic. Of course, by the time they were real and urgent, my mother had left it too late to put theory into practice, and her mind had lost its edge, so that even the most well-meaning doctor in the world could not have helped her, despite her years of devotion to the cause.

      I wasn’t there when my father died either, also in a nursing home, and also from complications arising from dementia. My parents had divorced some thirty-five years previously and I had subsequently become estranged from my father. But one of my abiding memories of him is his fantasy solution to the indignities of old age. He told us—me, my mother, and my older siblings—that he planned to sail out into the Pacific Ocean and drown himself. He repeatedly baulked at the first hurdle, however, by never obtaining a boat. He would read boat magazines and circle the For Sale ads in them. He would drive long distances to look over boats he liked the sound of, but he would always find a reason not to buy. Money was short, or he didn’t want to sail alone. At one point, he even asked my mother to buy a half share and to crew for him, an offer she declined. Maybe she should have taken him up on it. Maybe they should have sailed off into the sunset never to return; instead they lived on and died badly.

      No doubt my horror at how my parents ended their days influenced me to look into ways I might improve things when it came to my turn. With this in mind, soon after I was diagnosed with cancer, I followed my mother’s lead and joined Exit International, wanting to get up to speed on the latest developments in the assisted dying field. I also joined Dignitas in Switzerland, where it is legal for foreigners to obtain assistance to die, provided they are suffering from a terminal illness. This was an information-gathering exercise to explore the choices available to me, other than those offered by my doctors. I don’t wish to disparage the doctors who have cared for me over time. Individually they’ve been extraordinary, and of course I owe them a debt of gratitude. Apart from the palliative care specialists I’ve spoken to, however, none of my doctors ever raised the subject of death with me, a fact I still find mystifying.

      So another motive for joining Exit was to find a forum for simply broaching the topic, challenging the taboo that I felt was preventing my doctors from speaking openly to me about something so pertinent. Despite the ubiquity of death, it seems strange that there are so few opportunities to publicly discuss dying. Exit meetings are the only occasions when I’ve found it is possible for people to speak about death as a fact of life. The mood of the meetings is upbeat. My local chapter meetings are usually attended by about forty members, many of them elderly, but with a sprinkling of younger people eager, for whatever reason, to exchange information about ways and means to die. There is an inevitable cloak-and-dagger element to these gatherings, given that mere advice regarding suicide has the potential to be construed as a criminal offence. But this only adds to the atmosphere of bravado and high spirits. And of course there is humour. Did we all hear about Tom, nudging ninety, who decided to take his helium bottle up to his local cemetery and gas himself there? Apparently he figured the dead are unshockable. And, by the way, anyone who is interested in a refresher course on helium, please sign on for the upcoming workshop as soon as possible as numbers are limited. It might be any meeting of any common interest group, a bowls club, or a bird-watching fraternity, except that, after the tea-break, it’s back to rating cyanide and nitrogen gas according to ease of use, and speed.

      The chief benefit of these meetings to me is their spirit of camaraderie. It takes courage to contemplate one’s own death, and, as I said before, it is inexpressibly lonely. To find companions who share your desire to know more, to take the initiative, and to laugh in the face of our shared mortality, is a gift. How different from the experience of the hospital waiting room, where you sit in a glum herd with the overhead televisions blaring, guarding your dirty little secret until such time as your name is called. Whether it’s good news or bad, the message is the same. In hospitals we don’t talk about death, we talk about treatment. I would come out of consultations feeling as if my humanity had been diminished by the encounter, as if I’d been reduced to my disease alone, as if everything else that defines me had fallen away. By contrast, I came home from my Exit meetings emboldened, convinced that Camus was right: suicide is the only serious philosophical question.

      Exit encourages its members to keep the conversation going by forming smaller coffee-and-chat groups with friends. Ours is chaired by Jean, a sprightly widow in her early eighties, who lives not far from me, in Kangaroo Point. There’s a cafe near her flat where we can sit outside at a secluded corner table. We like to avoid being overheard. Counting myself, we are six regulars. I get a lift to meetings with Andrew, who has kidney cancer, and Colin, who has early stage Alzheimer’s disease. Tony arrives on the bike he manages to ride despite his Parkinson’s shakes. And Carol drives an hour and a half from the suburbs of the Sunshine Coast. There is nothing physically the matter with Carol, but after years of abuse, both emotional and physical, from her husband, she survives on a cocktail of anti-depressants and anti-anxiety medications. Her mental suffering makes her question the value of going on. The talk is remarkably intimate. Everyone knows why we’re there. It’s to comfort one another, to offer companionship. We’re like the last survivors on a sinking ship, huddled together

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