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by Tommy George
2015-10-18. Today would have been her 100th birthday. During the shortening days of December 2005, my mother, probably the only real friend I ever had, fell into a deep depression from which she never recovered. "Failure to thrive" was doctors' enigmatic diagnosis. It seemed more apt for an infant than a geriatric patient, but it had by then depleted most of her life reserves.
Most recently she had lost her ability to walk. Her world had been steadily shrinking, a bit more confining, sadder and weaker each day, until now . . . she had no mobility at all. Common sense had compelled Betty Tasseff voluntarily to relinquish her driver’s license and car at age 85. Now at age 90, she made another hard choice of her own free will--to leave her cozy assisted-living apartment in Westland, Michigan for the bleak horizon she had to face, the darkening horizon of end-life times.
She had arranged her own final relocation. Nobody prompted her. She had spent her life under nobody's authority but her own, and charted her own course as it drew to a close.
She was well-liked at the assisted-living complex she was leaving--so well-liked that her framed picture was one of only two resident portraits displayed on either side of the main entrance. Her apartment was a regular stop on tours given by staff to prospective new residents. It was atypical in its lack of overdone bric-a-brac.
She had made the most of her life there. She would miss her friends, but she intuited that her time to go had arrived, and moved herself--before some bureaucrat tried to make the arrangements for her. She was fiercely independent and sometimes surprisingly outspoken.
Her final accommodations were a semi-private room in a full-care nursing facility with an excellent reputation. Once settled in, she began planning the final leg of her life's journey, to abodes of death and beyond. Death was not a feared or unnatural appointment for her; she had a clear conscience, and was ready to go as quickly as possible, for life had lost its fun.
However, Michigan State legislators declare that anyone who dares assist people to self-deliver is committing the capital crime of Suicide Assistance. The euthanasia allowed a beloved pet does not extend to humans--with the exception of unborn humans.
I traveled from Iowa to Michigan for visits as often as possible. She was pretty low, but I could sometimes squeeze a bit of mirth from her with my remedy for the blues, sheer silliness.
Oy, Betty, the unfairness!--in my best blue-haired voice I would commiserate, as I spoon-fed her chicken soup--feeling so bad, but looking so good! Nobody around here even thinks you’re sick. You better start looking the part, Betty! Enough with the beauty already!
My mother was conscientious about maintaining her appearance. Now that grooming was one of the few activities she had left, she pursued it diligently. Let me throw that make up and wig in the garbage. Then you'll get some sympathy. It was hard not to betray my own despair at what her end-life promised to be.
She had the oldest prosthetic hip on record, dating back to 1970, but even the brightest of miracles deteriorate. Her orthopedic problems returned in the new millennium. A 2004 surgical revision only made matters worse, and began Betty Tasseff's slow journey down ever-rougher roads that by December of 2005 had deposited her in her present situation.
Her joie d'vie had evaporated, her independence was untenable, yet she continued to see with the same discerning mind that earned her the highest female position in the Detroit office of World War II’s Manhattan Project. |
| The Audrain Family of Fairland, Oklahoma 1914. Richard Audrain, top center, donated Betty's genetic inheritance on the paternal side, but Father and Daughter met only once in later life. |
My mother was liberated well ahead of the feminist movement, and a free-thinker of the practical variety all of her life--advocating death with dignity well before Detroit-area pathologist Dr. Jack Kevorkian attracted national notoriety. In 1990, when Jack Kevorkian was recruiting his first terminal volunteer, my mother had me investigate his "suicide machine" for my dad, George Tasseff, then terminally ill with bone cancer. My pops was suffering the pains of the damned, and in lucid moments saw nothing ahead but more misery--and how he detested hospitals!
Large doses of narcotic painkillers had knocked my dad mentally back to 1925 elementary school. Ten years old again. His catheter must have been bothersome, for he kept raising his hand like a kid in the school room, asking each unrecognized visitor to his hospital room for permission to “go to town”—a Highland Park euphemism for using the boy’s room--as in, "Teacher! Teacher! May I go to town? Teacher! May I go to town?"
Over the phone, Jack Kevorkian said that any test-pilot for his lethal contraption--his highly publicized, but still untested suicide machine--had to be in full possession of his mental faculties before any arrangement could be reached. I had to call Doctor Jack only days later to let him know that my father hadn't regained his mental competency, or even regained consciousness.
In fact, my dad died just a couple of hours after his rotation radiologist--eager to enroll my father in a pilot-study of experimental pain-reduction technique--had prognosticated that he "might live for another six weeks, another 6 months, or even another six years"—in the excruciating pain caused by his cancer, should we choose not to enroll him.
Apparently, my dad hadn’t heard about the doctor's schedule, for he died the same day. God dismissed George Tasseff’s classroom early that day, a mercy. Jack Kevorkian continued on to become the national caricature of assisted suicide, drawn broadly and droolingly, showing its worst predilections. Though he was on the right side of the issue, “Doctor Death” tainted assisted suicide with his personal eccentricities.
Mortality per se didn’t bother Mom. She knew no one escapes death. What did bother Betty Tasseff was the route she had to take to get there--through compulsory pain and dehumanization. Emily Dickinson’s “although I could not call on death, he kindly stopped for me” did not apply to Mom. Her strong vital signs made for worrisome prospects. Death would creep over her at a snail’s pace. In the end, it came from starvation and dehydration capped by too many days of terrifying opiate hallucinations.
I resented end-life punishment for an accomplished gentlewoman like her; and remembered her frequent declarations over cocktails--that when her quality of life was gone, she would find a way to shuffle off the mortal coil, by herself if necessary. Still, I was taken aback when in early 2006 dear old Mom quietly solicited my assistance with the act. She had already waited too long.
She asked me to get her "something to knock me out . . . permanently." And she had more than just a quick departure in her mind. She wished to depart life in the manner she lived it, in control and with amenities—cocktails, dinner, memories renewed, and departing endearments--followed by a self-elected, painless deliverance from final indignities.
Assisted Suicide has been criminalized not for purposes of faith, hope, and comfort, but for the benefit of health-industry lobbyists and the deep-pocketed interests they represent. The Michigan Legislature justifies its actions with pious, abstracted rationale, but my mother's reflections on the applied right to self-deliverance are far more honest.
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| Betty Zane, age 21, and Richard Scott Audrain at their one and only adult reunion in 1935 Tulsa, OK |
So there languished my mother, planning her illegal act, with me as its Master of Ceremonies. Misery! In a desperate emulation of latter-day doublethink, I prevaricated. I agreed conditionally to help her commit suicide in the Final Exit style, if only she would put her plan on hold for a score of days before carrying it out. If her heart still cried out for a self-charted final egress on Mother's Day, 2006--well, I would have the necessary ingredients waiting in the car, and I would mix up the lethal concoction and serve it to her myself.
We planned more than a fast getaway. First, the family would enjoy a going-away party for Mom--an affair forever to be remembered, and upon its unhurried conclusion, with my assistance, she would deliver herself in private, and according to the terms dictated by her. She would leave this life well-groomed and in command: just call the mortuary and have them pick me up, she said, and she wasn't kidding. She'd already made her own funeral arrangements; now she was arranging her own demise. It would be the ultimate in Mother's Day gifts. At one point I had made a decision to go with her, to avoid the legal hassle and prison time I would have to face. Ergo the lie.
Since I was the aspiring writer of our family, the drafting of her final communiqué was left to me. It would lay out the facts to Mom’s sympathizers and detractors alike. It would have made a spectacular feature piece on Mother's Day, but my cowardice got the better of me.
We all have a natural and a constitutional right to determine our own deaths; and the AMA is long overdue to endorse an acceptable ethic. It was time in 1990 and 2006--and it still is time, more than ever--to jam it down a few key corridors of power. Legal abortion but illegal assisted suicide smacks of the most debased hypocrisy. All for a few lousy bucks.
The document was never written. This piece is probably as close as I will ever come.
We planned the act for Mother's Day, then some three weeks away. However, following my Spring visit, I began to regret my promise. I could serve many months—years, even--in prison for helping my mom kill herself, despite her desperate desire for euthanasia. From the reports I was getting over the phone, she was almost there anyway--disoriented, incontinent, nauseated, depressed and suffering. Maybe all the dope made her forget the pact we made.
Doctors had enrolled her with a visiting hospice service that began pumping morphine into her by the hour, aiming to build up a lethal dose over time--so much dope that it would be a miracle if she remembered anything at all. I prayed that my mom would have forgotten our suicide confabulations by the time I saw her on Mother's Day, because I just couldn’t go through with my promised assistance under any circumstances. I was a callow cad.
When I arrived for her special day, her greatly deteriorated condition was evident and awful. She could barely speak—or simply didn’t care to--and was not looking at all her usual well-groomed self. She didn't know day from night and confused present events with the happenings of many years past. She would no longer even look at food, and had even stopped drinking fluids—but when the others left us alone, she looked hopefully at me with the last brightness I would ever see in her eyes, and inquired, had I gotten the stuff?
In 2005, end-of-life services (those tendered in the final year of life) accounted for 20 - 40% of all expenditures made by mammoth Medicare and private co-insurers. Caregivers consider it easy money. The ethical incongruity between fetuscide’s legality and assisted suicide's criminalization sickens me.
Not only had she remembered our pact, it had been ever in her mind--and now her last hope to control the mortal battle had failed her. My shamed look and mumbled excuses said it all. The brightness departed and she looked utterly crestfallen—like a long-marooned sailor as she watches her rescue-ship sink in plain sight. She only mentioned it once—her son was a big-talker, short on delivering--and let the matter go.
Elizabeth Tasseff wished to die as she had lived, independent and in control of herself. A cocktail hour, shared meal, and evening of conversation would have been vastly preferable to everyone involved than what actually happened. I know she would have presented a happier aspect to me when I was summoned to confirm the ID of her 60-pound remains. It has been years now, and I believe she is still mad at me for being such a coward, among other things. But I will not accept all blame for the unwarranted cruelty of her death. What Michigan's health care system inflicted upon her was disgraceful and egregiously out of line with Hippocratic ethics too.
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A couple of weeks after Mother's Day of 2006 my mother took the precipitous nose-dive we had been warned to expect. Suddenly she was a "gomer"--in the disgruntled, minimum-wage parlance of caregivers--for patients finally rendered comatose and uncomplaining. However, her coma was in no way serene.
We all gathered around her the first night, cradling her hands, touching her, and stroking her hair; but watching in horror as her increased hourly morphine-dose triggered hellish reactions. Her eyes would open in fright, but they registered no sign of recognition, only some terrifying hallucination she alone could see.
We would comfort her until she settled, until the next dark specter would rear up from subconscious depths and tear into her, causing her blind eyes to pop open again, and her hands to grope blindly for someone to cling to--for reassurance she was still alive, I suppose. So the first of her final nights continued, in cycling horror.
Each labored breath sounded like her last to us, until a hospice nurse apprised Mom's family that her gasping, hallucinatory torture would probably persist for 2 or 3 days before death might kindly stop for her. I remained by her bedside the first night after the others had departed and tried to find anything redeeming in the process. The medical establishment had grown increasingly powerful over my lifetime, and now it was riding rough-herd over highly intelligent men and women for profit. It smacks of racketeering that no self-respecting gangster would stoop to do.
Although her breathing sounds were absolutely terrifying to me—stertorous, loud, and so labored she might’ve been drowning—or maybe I was hallucinating, but I swear I heard her subvocatively singing "The Star Spangled Banner" beneath all those awful deathly gasps. She had always been patriotic, owing to the real menaces of WWII she helped eliminate.
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| Elizabeth Ann Hickox, Zane, Audrain, Prill, Holley, Tasseff Geez, you piled up a lot of names, Mom. |
Maybe not all of her hallucinations were so petrifying. I wasn't with her 24/7. But I do know she would have been ashamed and disgusted had she watched any one forced to submit to this corrupted sinkhole of regulation. There is no market for the kind of suffering she had to swallow--no market except the one that held her captive, created by a handful of unconscionable privateers.
Mom had always wished me "an occasional shining moment" as we ended our long-distance, good-night phone calls over the years. I hoped that she was having some shining final moments too, inside her troubled mind, and not entirely tied up in the netherworld of a haunted end-life--five days of agony--but I have my doubts. Saturday May 27, 2006, around dinner time, my mom gave up the ghost.
Smart, practical lady that she was, all she had wanted was to skip those last weeks--no big deal, just a bad time avoided. But I know, and I suspect most of us boomers know, as end-life expenditures balloon for the post-WWII generations—already well en route to record-breaking stays at overcrowded 2020 hospices--our Michigan plutocrats will eventually not only be forced to reconsider assisted suicide, soon they'll be peddling it wholesale, basing the improved ethic on nothing beyond financial--er, better make that moral-- considerations. The mercenary sons-of-b-tches.
I can’t wait to hear the slogans of fifty years hence--probably slogans like “Death with Dignity and an Ice-Cold Coke” or “Passing Away as It Was Always Meant to Be.” Then, dear Mom, you will have proven your thinking well in advance of the times, as usual.
Well, you fly off to that happy hour in the sky, Mom, and I'll meet you there once I am done here.
Your loving son,
--Tommy George, 2006, revised in 2015, 2017
