An impending death

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In some cases there is no easy way to determine what medical practices might, in a reasonable time, restore normal functioning. In some cases it is obvious medicine can determine a condition is totally hopeless. There are no easy choices and since a very sick patient has a very distorted view of possibilities it is very likely not obvious that the patient can make the correct choice.It's also quite possible even a doctor cannot make the right choice.

Rho, it's not giving up. She's decided she's done. There is a difference. She's lived her life, now her body and mind are breaking down, and she doesn't want to be forced to live that way. Rather than look at "Is it right to let her give up?" look at it more as, "what right do I have to force her to live this way?"

If she is determine to not eat, and she maintains that stance during her bouts of dementia, it is ethically wrong for you to deny her wishes and force feed her. However, if she's in a demented state, and asks for food, by all means give it to her. This is not a choice of whether or not to withhold food and medications from her, it is a choice to not force something on her that she doesn't want.

Have you asked Mandi if they had discussed this issue over the years? Perhaps your wife is accepting of this because she knows for a fact that her mom thought this way before the dementia, or even during her more lucid times as it first began.

I know this is hard for you, but you know that God is waiting for her. If she's ready, let her go home...

The last thing that my grandpa said to my grandma before he died was that he would walk slowly.
Perhaps Wanda has someone walking slowly for her too.

Walk Slowly
By Adelaide Love

If you should go before me, dear, walk slowly
Down the ways of death, well-worn and wide,
For I would want to overtake you quickly
And seek the journey’s ending by your side.

I would be so forlorn not to descry you
Down some shining highroad when I came;
Walk slowly, dear, and often look behind you
And pause to hear if someone calls your name.

Even assuming there is a God (which I don't and will not waste time arguing about it), whatever decision is made will be a human decision and to blame it on God is total cowardice. It is , no doubt, an horrific terribly difficult decision and it must rest on human shoulders.

Damn! You made my cry.

ruveyn

Giving up can happen - my near bruush wit suicide long years back would so have counted.

But it need not be in there. THIS life is not someting to cling to - we do the job assigned us, sometimes wishing the end of the semester were nearer, we take what pleasure we find - but ultimately this is NOT the ultimate.

When my mother in law left [she, like her husband before her, had made it clear "heroic measures" were not in her plan], she was in great and heart-rending agony - until her priest, a great man who had rousted himself out of bed after midnight to come to the hospital, started the 23rd psalm. At which point she was instantly at ease and imperceptibly stepped through the door.

There is a time and a tide. Trust the process.

Dying is defeat. It's only virtue is the relief of absolute and total misery.

Not so much that it is "right", so to speak, within any context of morality or "righteous living" or whatever, but yes, it is absolutely "okay" -- no condemnation ahead for anyone -- to do so.

Other than the part about Wanda's having now come to a point of "insisting" upon the matter, you have perfectly described my very own 80+ mother-in-law's overall situation, circumstances, "condition" and such ... and in her particular case, I happen to be the "advocate" who does exactly as Mandi is doing whenever her (my mother-in-law's) wishes are known to me.

Dying is defeat?

Nay nay. Who are you fighting with?

The way this universe is constructed, death is inevitable for epithelial cells, for individual life forms, for species, planets, star systems, galaxies, the universe. We sit here playing Russian roulette to decide WHEN - not whether - we will die.

When we die [I will include you] we walk out of the stack-odds casino. The defeat is to death - left like a ravening beast on a small island with nothing more to eat but itself.

I think we sometimes tend to "worship life" a bit much -- no criticism intended there -- and I see nothing in Scripture suggesting we should ever even consider doing so. Rather (and as you would certainly already know) ...

"... being always of good courage, and knowing that while we are at home in the body we are absent from the Master – for we walk by belief, not by sight – we are of good courage, and are well pleased rather to be absent from the body and to be present with the Master." (2 Corinthians 5:6-8)

At that point, of course, some of us might wonder about the dying one's "spiritual status" ...

... but then the real issue there, and as others here have already mentioned in a variety or ways, is the matter of simply not imposing indefensible interference upon/over someone else's apparent-or-proclaimed willingness and/or determined "readiness" to now face whatever might yet be ahead.
======================

Backing up just a bit ...

In August of 2008, my mother had open-heart surgery for the replacement of a valve. I was personally pleased when that "new part" for her body came from a bovine source rather than from swine ... but I digress.

My mother had one of those DNR "advance directive" kinds of things ... and yet the doctors nevertheless-and-immediately took her right back into an operating room and did some additional (even though previously-noted as unnecessary) work on her after she had experienced complete cardiac arrest the next morning (following the initial surgery). I was furious.

While sparing everyone here the discomfort of having to suffer through all the details, and while simultaneously avoiding getting all would up all on my own anyway, I will just say the next four months of my mother lying in that hospital bed and endlessly suffering all the way up to the eventual time of her death were absolutely horrendous for everyone.

My point here in all of this, actually, is only a simple one:

When she finally awoke for just a bit about a week after that second surgery, she told me she "wanted to die" -- she knew it was "all over" for here -- but then my pastor-brother and some of them other prophets of Ba'al nevertheless tortured her with their BS (and she "bought into it") ... and then did not even want me to come visit any more.

Last edited by leejosepho on 30 Apr 2011, 1:25 pm, edited 5 times in total.

Right... our telomeres 'tell' it as it is (if I'm going to be punny...)

We're like computer programs - regardless of whether guided evolution or simply evolution crafted us, we only have so many 'JND LOOP' in us. It'll be interesting to see what kind of 'can-o-worms' we open once we're able to stop the erosion of telomeres.

This thread was created by AngelRho. That message was clearly labeled to "Rho". And he very, very much believes in God. He and I have a lot of very DIFFERING ideas about what God is or might be, but THAT isn't the point here at all.

I don't think I was displaying cowardice, and I'm sorry you feel that way. For someone such as Rho who believes so powerfully in God, I think this is a completely reasonable way to look at it. His moral reason for not knowing if observing her wishes is ok, came from a strictly religious place.

Deciding that it's her time to go in not invasive. It's accepting the reality that the human body is designed to die. Her body and mind are failing and this is a state you don't "recover" from for the duration. Forcing a feeding tube on her IS invasive and incredibly unjust to the victim that doesn't want it.

If Rho can lean on his faith in God in this issue, then he should be encouraged to do so. He has to find peace with this. If he can't, that could end up causing extra stress in his home life when this is a time for family to come together and give each other the strength they need to get through it.

@AngelRho: I truly hope my angry expression related to some religious folks' actions during my mother's horrible suffering did not come across as any kind of indictment against your own considerations about any or all of this.

Ohhh gosh. Did I come across as angry? I'm looking at what lee quoted from me and his following comment.. and...I'm not seeing a correlation, unless I've come across as angry. I'm really, really not. My heart is breaking for Rho. I know that this is a huge moral challenge for him on top of being a painful situation... But I'm coming to realize that I might not always express the intent of my words well. Plus, I seem to get very confused about the intent of others words...

Like ruveyn's comment that I made him cry... I wondered if there was sarcasm there, but to question it felt incredibly heartless if he was not being sarcastic. Then I had to consider that when sharing my grandfather's last words, I worried that people might think it a bit too romantically perfect, and might think that I made it up. My grandfather died two years ago, and my grandma just shared his last words with me at Easter, so it's still very fresh in my heart. My grandma shared it because my son is still having a hard time dealing with the death. She is planning to take my son out on grandpa's birthday and they will tie messages to helium balloons and send them up. Her message will be "You better be walking slowly".... and she had to explain why to me.

This thread is all about grief and compassion.. and how to deal with it. Every time I visit this thread I cry... for Rho, for Mandi, for Wanda, for my grandpa, and for me. Reality sucks sometimes.

No, no, no, and not in even any slightest way. Rather, my reading of your post simply pricked my own conscience a bit ... and I thank you.

My purpose for posting HERE is that I thought what I'm experiencing with my wife would actually be worth discussing here and exploring various angles of facing the very real possibility of keeping someone alive under difficult circumstances and moral/ethical considerations involved. If it were about protecting my feelings, I'd have posted elsewhere. For what it's worth, I don't even think what HAS been said, by anyone, to be insensitive.

@BurntOutMom: Yes, I do believe powerfully in God, as you put it. I do firmly believe that God speaks to those who believe in Him (and very well possibly even to those who don't). However, I also believe that not EVERY answer can be so neatly checked against scripture, nor is it it even necessarily so easy to discern between what God is saying or my own biases (or other influences, spiritual or temporal). The Bible itself relates the experiences of those who have consulted God only to be met with silence, and sometimes "letting go" is the only real answer.

That said, Christians do not hold a monopoly on moral or ethical truth. Suppose I was really asking "What do I do?" or "reaching out for help" as it were. What certainty is there that the answer comes from what some might consider to be an unlikely source? After all, we are all different people with varying ideas about what is right in this situation. It seems to me, and I tend to agree, that the consensus is that this matter is not in my hands anyway and that my main concern should be supporting my wife in any way she needs me to.

The kind words and support, however, are not going unnoticed, so you do have my thanks!

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I suppose it wouldn't do any harm if I gave an update on the situation:

My wife's car broke down yesterday as she was preparing to return home. She was staying with her grandmother's sister and decided it best to stay one more night until I could come get her. We had company (Mandi's best friend from high school and college) staying over, and with my wife out of town I think I showed extraordinary restraint by keeping my hands to myself. But that's a story for another post and a bit of a running joke among the three of us.

So I had the good luck of "Aunt DeeDee" willing to watch the kids while I made the 2 hour drive to retrieve Mandi today. Mandi said that she sleeps 90% of the time and doesn't seem to feel any pain when she is awake. She has not moved for 4 days, and fell out of bed late last evening--nothing seems to be broken, and she has no new bruises on her legs. She will eat some fruit and soft foods because it's too difficult to chew or swallow anything else. She's taking no meds at all. This is somewhat comforting to everyone else, I think, because it suggests that she will rest peacefully at the end. I do hope that is so.

I have frequently been in contact with Rho for a long time. I highly respect his intellect and I accept his attachment to religion but my point was that a belief in God is irrelevant in this type of critical situation since the overwhelming bulk of believers, whatever their faith in the existence of an afterlife, are still stubbornly living creatures who hold tremendous value in merely being alive. There are many highly invasive medical procedures frequently necessary under critical conditions and I doubt that there is any inevitability of death in any case so scantily laid out in this discussion. You simply do not know what might be necessary and perhaps this is not even apparent to a doctor, but perhaps extreme methods could be functional. The decisions here are highly personal and religion is irrelevant.