‘It was time to facilitate an end’
Rick Durst, who wrote his own obituary, chose to end his battle with cancer with medically-assisted death
About two hours after Rick Durst died in his room with a view of Ontario’s Lake Muskoka, on a snow-whipped December evening, his wife, Val Koziol, walked over to his computer and clicked send on an email her husband had been composing ever since his doctors informed him that the cancer he had successfully battled for 26 years finally had him beat.
The email was addressed to Durst’s friends, far and wide. The subject line read: “Goodbye.”
“When you get this email I will have moved on,” Durst wrote. “Most likely I will have crossed the “Rainbow Bridge”. The place where I last saw Rusty in a dream. (Note: Rusty, the wonder dog, was Durst’s beloved Golden Retriever).
“For the less spiritual — I am dead. This last battle with cancer has been tough. I moved backwards, steadily, with nothing to be optimistic about and lots of discomfort foreseen for the future. So it was time to facilitate an end to this struggle.
“The Hail Mary passes ended. Beam me up, Scotty.”
The email continued, noting Durst’s life adventures, such as motorcycling through Mexico and up the West Coast; trekking on every continent except Antarctica; paddling wild rivers; being lowered by bucket into a Zimbabwean gold mine; raising $500,000 for the Terry Fox Foundation (and thanking all the sponsors he had badgered for funds). A shorter version of the email appeared in the National Post as an obituary, where Durst made plain, in the second sentence, that he had chosen a “medically-assisted death.”
And so there it was, a newspaper obituary unlike any other. Penned not by the living mourning someone whom they had lost, but by a dying, 64-year-old man, who left life on his own terms. Durst was loved for his generosity, adventurous spirit, stubborn adherence to principle — such as thou shalt not drink coffee unless it is an extrastrength brew — and uncanny ability to always have the last word, even in death.
“It is not an easy thing, necessarily, to arrange an assisted death,” Koziol says. “That was why Rick was so adamant about putting it in the first paragraph of his obituary — that he chose to end his life — because it has this strange aura around it.
“It’s not normalized, and it may never be.”
Indeed. Medically assisted death isn’t something people generally kibitz about over breakfast. Durst knew for years that he wanted to author his own ending, when it came, and lived long enough to do so legally at home. (One of the unexplored topics around medically-assisted death might be what it means for the future of obituary writing). In October, he started pulling together thoughts for his death notice. Durst edited what he wrote, wrestled over word choices — and what to include or leave out — tweaks that grew harder to make as his body withered. The obit concludes with some advice for the living: “Guilt, regret, and envy are the thieves of happiness. Avoid at all cost.”
“He laboured at it,” Koziol says, “because it was what he wanted.”
Durst’s funeral was held at Trinity-St. Paul’s United Church in midtown Toronto eight days after the emailed goodbye. Sun was pouring through the church’s eastfacing windows. The dead man’s ashes, in a pine urn with a pine tree on it, were set beside a podium, with arrangements of white roses nearby. A choir sang. The air outside was crisp. It was exactly the kind of day Durst, an avid powder skier, had always loved.
David Allan, a business associate, described him “as extraordinary, and out of the ordinary.” A financial wunderkind, unlike most any other, who, as a young man, struck out on his own, leaving the security and certain riches of an established investment firm to become a “solitary bloodhound.” Durst would sniff out small and medium privatelyowned businesses with untapped upsides and help take them public. Among his finds were Linamar, a Mom and Pop auto-parts-machining business in Guelph Ont., now worth six billion dollars.
“Rick understood the why and the how,” Allan said.
Vivi Price, a Muskoka neighbour, cherished Durst’s friendship. After her husband died from cancer, he would invite her over for a steak. They would have a glass of wine. Talk.
“Rick helped me through a very difficult time,” she said.
His canoe buddy, Preston Thom, spoke of Durst’s energy on trips. When he finished a portage, he ran back to help stragglers. If the group needed more firewood, he got it. If dishes needed washing, it was on him. Durst couldn’t hide the physical effects of his cancer, in time. But he never complained. When Thom thinks of his friend, he thinks of one word: “Courage.”
Durst declined his regimen of painkillers on the day he died. He often joked with his sisterin-law, Carol, about the “sweetspot,” where the caffeine from his high-test morning coffee intersected with the morphine. But on that last day he wanted to be fully present. He wanted to be alive. On that note, he sent Val out into the blowing snow to get him a cheeseburger from Harvey’s (with relish, onions and mustard). He drank a shot of whiskey with his oldest brother, Larry, his nephew, Peter, and four sisters-in-law. They hugged. Laughed. Cried. And, at 6:25 p.m., Durst gave the doctors the thumb’s up.
It was time to go.
“He had been so beat up and so ravaged by the cancer, and having been such an adventurer his whole life, it was a release for him,” Val Koziol says. “And it’s difficult to go through — but I am very proud of Rick for staring death in the face and saying, “OK, I am ready.”
“He did it. And it must have taken a huge amount of courage to do.”