Doug PollardThou shalt not kill but needst not strive, officiously, to keep alive
Let ALSO die in peace, too
This has been a year of hard decisions.
My mother had for years been slowly – agonisingly slowly – falling deeper and deeper into the dreadfulness of Alzheimer’s.
Though physically strong from years working in canteen kitchens, she forgot.
She forgot that her husband was dead, which let her give herself to any man in the home who thought she was his wife.
She forgot that the Second World War was over.
She forgot how to walk.
But she was sufficiently aware of the home she was in and the security measures that stopped her wandering to imagine she had been put in prison.
When the doctors came to treat her recurrent infections, she scratched, fought and bit to keep them off. She had to be swiftly sedated in order to be treated.
Now and then, she became so sick she was taken to hospital to recover, usually while sedated. When she awoke, she would cry out with fear, not knowing where she was. She would tear the drip from her arm and demand to be left alone. She would be sedated once more and shipped back to the home.
And each time, she was less and less who she used to be. More and more fell away.
My sister and I spoke to her doctors. She may be in her eighties, but she is physically strong, she could go on like this for years, we said, getting worse and worse and more and more miserable angry and afraid.
Yes, they replied. So you have a choice. You have already instructed us “Do Not Resuscitate”. Do you wish to escalate that instruction to “Do Not Treat’?
After long and agonising discussions, we said: let things take their natural course. Let her die in her own room with her own things around her. It’s cruel to keep taking her to hospital, reviving her, and bringing her back. When there is only more darkness and misery in prospect.
But the next time she fell ill, someone at the home decided they would ignore our instructions, and shipped her off anyway. We were ready.
My sister immediately went to the hospital and ensured that our mother was allowed to die peacefully in her sleep, with the chaplain and herself at the bedside.
It was hard to say, ‘let her die’, but it was also the right thing to do. We wept, not once, but many times.
Then shortly after I returned from her funeral, my dogs fell ill.
Now you may cringe at my linking this with my mother’s death, but those dogs had been my constant companions for almost fifteen years. They too had a big chunk of my heart.
The same agonising decisions had to be made.
No cure was possible. One dog could not be saved. The other – well, we could have put him through a series of tests, operations and therapies, costing unknown thousands of dollars.
“Be honest,” I said to the vet. “What would that buy us?”
“Impossible to say until we start the tests – depends on the results.”
“But if you find the cause is treatable, what are we looking at? Weeks? Months? Years? And if we don’t treat? Just give palliative care?”
“With palliative care you’re looking at maybe a week, maybe two. With CAT scans, surgery, possibly radio and chemo, three to six months. A year if he survives the treatment.”
“Then please book them both in for euthanasia tomorrow. They were born together. Let them go together.”
And again, I wept.
I could have insisted my mother be brought back again and again. I could have insisted that Pono be put through the torture of intensive invasive treatments. But I knew in my heart of hearts that hope was vain, and that I would only be torturing the ones I loved.
Torturing them to stave off my own loss, my own grief.
It was right to let them go, in the best circumstances we could contrive.
We could have gone on paying thousands of pounds a year to keep my mother alive in misery. High level aged care is expensive, but there was a little money left. Enough to allow my sister to pay off the house, and to buy me a small pension.
We could have spent thousands of dollars on painful and ultimately futile treatments for Pono.
But sometimes you have to stop clinging to the ones you love, the ones who have done so much for you in the past, the ones whose roots are twined in your heart and whose deaths make scars that never heal.
Sometimes you have to look forward to building the best life you can without them.
And, to be brutally frank, sometimes you have to stop throwing good money after bad, save what you can, and put it to better use.
Money that would have been spent on doctors and vets in an attempt to save the unsavable is now benefitting the living.
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ALSO was once a vital organisation. Without it, we should not have, for example, the VAC. Or Minus 18. But it is dying. Membership income is paltry. Directory income is paltry. Fundraising events do no more than break even. The shop makes a tiny profit.
Meanwhile instead of concentrating on its core business, it spreads itself as thinly as a scrape of margarine on a slice of toast. Let's face facts. Despite everything the frantic spin doctors say, it is dying.
If you’re a member of ALSO, bear that in mind when you vote on the twentieth. Are you going to take half a million dollars from the dead to keep a walking corpse alive? Are you going to buy $500k of false hope, unkeepable promises, pie in the sky hopes of ‘better communication’, ‘higher visibility’, imaginary government grants?
Or are you going to say, with deep sorrow, no, doctor, let her go. We will not waste the money on your fees. Please, end the suffering now.
Remember, thou shalt not kill but needst not strive, officiously, to keep alive.
Let her go, and let the living build a new ALSO that will do what it was always meant to do with what remains. Do that one thing, and do it bloody well – be a help and a safeguard, an advocate and a carer, a safety net for the seniors in our community.
It is our last chance to honour the vision of those who have gone before, and to provide solace and comfort and care to those of our community whose lives have often been harsh, and are now drawing to a close.
It’s the right thing to do. It’s the compassionate thing to do. Vote NO on the 20th.
