Death With Dignity
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Content warning: This piece includes references to hospice care, graphic bodily functions, murder, mental health struggles, and drug addiction. Please read with care.
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I was 7 months pregnant and almost asleep when I heard a knock at my sister’s bedroom door. I was visiting my mom, sisters, and granny in Medford, Oregon. It was March of 2021, almost exactly one year since the world shut down during the COVID-19 pandemic. “We’re going to do it now if you want to be there…”
My granny had been in hospice care for a bit, and her time was near. We didn’t—well, I didn’t—know how much time was left, so my mom asked me to come visit.
My Granny had been nearly comatose the entire time I was there. She looked so frail and so peaceful, sleeping all day long for days on end. We’d take turns sitting on her bed, sitting on a chair, holding her hand. We were soaking in the last days with her as she peacefully slipped further and further away from the life she clung to.
And then we heard the scream.
The guttural, shrill shrieking out of my little sister, coming from the room where Granny’s hospice bed was set up.
We all came running. A thick black, rust-colored substance erupting from her mouth like a volcano connected to the bowels of the earth.
She seemed alert, if only for those brief moments of what I imagined to have been excruciating pain and discomfort. The gurgling alone sounded like she was drowning in honey. At the time, we were focused on cleaning her up and comforting my sister, who was in a full-on hysterical sob.
It was terrifying for her. We explained that it was her body shutting down and coming undone in the face of the cancer that was ravaging her body. She had been diagnosed with colon cancer about 10 years prior and had lived with my mom since we picked her up off the streets in San Diego on death’s door. We quite literally kidnapped her.
She was hesitant to leave the vagabond (homeless-drug-riddled-RV-when-she-had-one-in-an-abandoned-lot) lifestyle that she claimed to love.
I think that was a part of her coping, like one of the lies we tell ourselves—what she needed to get through another day in her personal hell on earth. 40 years of addiction. 40 years of numbing and running away from memories that haunted her. Haunted her so deeply that she believed her life was better rotting from the inside out in a car in a parking lot of 7-11 in the city she grew up in.
I’ve always loved my granny. Though, I never really cherished her as a typical grandmother. She wasn’t soft or lace; she was leather and cigarettes. She wasn’t around always, and sometimes we’d go see her in a tent somewhere. I remember being embarrassed of her a few times, but mostly, I loved the hell out of her. She tickled my back to sleep every night we were in the same place at my bedtime, and she would sing to me. I confronted her, once, about “spreading lies” about my mother’s own drug use—and trust me when I say this: that was a top 5 hilarious moment of my life, looking back now (my mom is a recovering addict).
However, it wasn’t until after she died that I felt such a deep sadness for her lifestyle.
It wasn’t until I was a mother that I understood just how much she needed protection from whatever ghost had harmed her. She was so deeply broken, and I never understood. But I guess that’s just another lie I grew up believing… creating? Another story that I’m not sure about its origins.
Did she love this life, or was she stuck without knowing how to get help—and not help from substances? I think she had been clean at some points—but help for her soul, help understanding, forgiving, living with whatever happened to her. She was never able to control that narrative, and it breaks my heart that she could have felt the way I have felt before.
The way I feel. The way that I know so many people in our family—our friends, our world—feel daily, and not find peace before she was taken from us.
In the end, it wasn’t the cancer that took her. It was my mom.
It turns out it wasn’t her body shutting down on its own. Her and my mom had a pact that if she began to suffer, she would help her die. “Death with dignity” is legal in Oregon state, but they didn’t have enough time to get their paperwork in order.
Or so I was told. As I’m writing this, I’m realizing that I do not know what is true—at all—when it comes to my family lore that I did not witness myself.
The night before hell itself came pouring out of her body, my mom, assisted by my 16-year-old sister, gave her a big enough dose of morphine to take down a horse.
Apparently, 40 years of drugs makes your tolerance a little bit higher. It didn’t kill her, but she would die that night regardless. Because there was a pact… right?
“I had sister help me last night. We crushed up her meds.”
Oh, okay. So it was this type of movie, I thought to myself.
“We’re going to do it now if you want to be there.”
I told her I was tired and didn’t want to.
“Your sisters are in there.”
I told her I didn’t want to. And then I asked if she wanted me there.
“Yeah, I do. I need my number one.”
So I went.
We had a pep-talk-style briefing that this was a pact, a promise to not let Granny suffer, and what was about to happen would never leave the room.
My mom promised to not tell her husband.
My sister promised to not tell her boyfriend.
My other sister promised to not tell anyone.
And I promised the same.
I think she covered her head with a towel only after she started suffocating her with her hand. My granny’s eyes opened for several panicked moments before her body convulsed and then went limp.
“Someone needs to check her pulse.”
My sisters were sobbing and holding on to each other, so I went, my body on autopilot, my soul completely abandoned me after I was summoned as my mom’s number one.
Number one, what? Accomplice? Friend? Daughter? Number one trauma survivor? Or number one, as in her firstborn who has carried her the longest? Yeah, probably that one.
Her neck was waxy to the touch, but I felt no heartbeat.
The days, weeks, and months after were a blur. I tried to block it out as much as possible, but a few months later, my mom was arrested.
My sister was in mental health distress, and she and my mom talked about what would happen if my sister were to discuss that night with a therapist.
My mom told her she would accept whatever consequences would come with my sister speaking freely to get the help she needed. And my sister wouldn’t be responsible for what happened to her.
The investigation and trial were relatively straightforward and short. We answered questions. There was a news article. There was a hearing.
Not only did we lie to our entire family at the funeral and for months on end, we had some family members rightfully stop contact with all of us. I was devastated, but I understood more than my mom, who positioned herself as the victim to my cousin’s decision.
I had to remind my mom that my cousin owed her no explanation. That she had every right to choose distance from the person who killed her granny, the person who kept the killer’s secret (me), and that she (my mom) had made fucked up shit seem normal all of our lives, so people farther removed from us weren’t as immune to it.
During the hearing, the judge said she had a hard time coming to a decision because it was such a difficult and hard position, she imagined, for my mom.
She said that she could see herself in my mom’s shoes and didn’t know what she would have done if it were her.
Being human is such a complex existence. Right versus wrong is so muddled when we have the capacity to feel and experience grief, loss, pain, suffering, and heartbreak.
“I would do it again, Your Honor,” was in my mom’s statement.
How can something as wrong as taking someone’s last breath from them feel humane? How could it feel like the right thing to do? But if so, how could you do it in front of people? To be witnessed? To not carry the burden alone? How could you ask that of people? I still have so many unanswered questions.
The judge charged her with criminally negligent homicide—a felony—and sentenced her to no jail time with some probation, which she was released from early.
I don’t remember much except those parts, but it seemed like, once again, my mom never truly had any real consequences for her actions, at least not on the outside. I know it tore her apart inside, and I know it still does.
Throughout all of this, I remained the rock, the voice of reason. Almost robotic. I comforted my mom. I comforted my sister.
I kept the secret.
I gave my cousin space.
I did my part.
I supported my sister in crisis.
During all this, I had a baby. I was a new mom, and one day it hit me:
How in the fuck could I ever ask my child to witness—no, assist in a murder?
The answer was so clear, so simple.
I couldn’t. I wouldn’t.
What the fuck is wrong with my mom?
I lost my granny, and there was so much going on that I had to hold together that I never fell apart. I usually don’t fall apart in grief or crisis, anyway. It feels almost conditioned out of me.
I don’t know what happened to my Granny in life, but wherever she is, I hope she is at peace and feels dignified in death.
