January 21, 2006
My mother is dying. At 83, she is 30 kilograms below her fighting
weight, too weak to get out of bed unassisted, permanently nauseous
and unable to eat more than a few mouthfuls without retching
and often gripped by dizzy spells even while lying supine. She
reckons she's had enough.
She's done her level best, a tough best conditioned by an orphaned
childhood, in the backblocks of the Riverina during the Depression,
accented by a long spell in calipers with her polio, and raising
children in the guest house she helped run from the age of 20,
when Dad was away at sea for most of the year.
She's endured all the prescribed medical interventions: drugs
and ECT for the nausea accompanying the anti-depressants, the
whole dazzling pharmacopoeia that the industry has assembled
to keep the elderly in a fit state to pay bills as long as humanly
possible - knee replacements in her late 70s and the excruciating,
useless rehab that went with that, long lonely stays in depressing
private clinics where the doctors had trouble bringing her name
to mind, and major surgery last year to install the aortic valve
of a pig. As I say, she's done her best, but now she just wants
to go.
She could just give up her medication, but she dreads the prospective
outcome, a stroke that fails to carry her off and leaves her
even more miserable than she already is.
She's beautiful, dignified and courageous.
In all this she's never been seen to shed a tear of self-pity
- humorous and reassuring to all of us who love her and have
to watch this dire process. What she desperately needs is appropriate
care from a doctor, the same reluctant but loving care that
veterinary surgeons extend to cats and dogs every day.
But she can't have that. She couldn't talk about it on the phone
without becoming a criminal, for God's sake - even if she were
able to get to the phone. The same Government that has abjured
so many services to the living on the grounds that self-help,
market forces and freedom of choice are sacrosanct, has decreed
that Mum, dying, can't make this decision for herself, and that
we who love her must also stand around and watch the consequences
on pain of losing our own freedom.
Shame on us all for bowing under the hypocritical, mindless
yoke of this dismal administration, both champions of laissez-faire
and double-speaking thought police as it suits them.
Stephen Clarke Summer Hill
