Diary reveals woman’s emotional plight
Annemarie Treadwell took her own life and her diary revealed her plea for the choice to die on her own terms.
Annemarie Treadwell was not terminally ill, but she was through with life. Outwardly she may have impressed others with her liveliness. Her diary recorded her days. Time spent with her daughter and friends, outings, and enthusiasms.
Her doctor considered her one of the more active and well older patients.
In the diary, discovered after her death, Treadwell wrote that her doctor seemed to think she was much better than she was, physically and mentally.
But she thought she found someone who understood, someone who ‘‘accepted my view of my case’’. Susan ‘‘Suzy’’ Austen was a euthanasia activist who had the contacts to source pentobarbitone overseas.
So Treadwell made her plans, put her affairs in order, wrote cheques for the charities she supported and put her much-loved white cat in the hands of vets who would find it a new home.
She left a letter when she took her own life, but months earlier she had publicly declared her wish to control her own death. It appeared achingly honest and emphatic.
Annemarie Treadwell, ‘‘still with all her marbles’’, wanted options for when she was done with life. And she wanted a parliamentary committee considering assisted dying to know why.
There were many words in capital letters, underlined, some in italics. Treadwell couldn’t find enough ways to convey how much she wanted the law changed. Her words were alive and forceful.
It was January 2016 and she was in a retirement home in one of Wellington’s southern suburbs, Kilbirnie.
Treadwell was 77, and said ageing was filled with continuous losses. Youth had also been a time of loss. When Treadwell was just five days old her mother died.
By the time she wrote to the select committee she was on a steady diet of painkillers for the arthritis that had crippled her hands, and was now spoiling her feet, and perhaps her hips.
She was annoyed that it made her clumsy and embarrassed when she dropped things in public.
In the gloomy months of the year seasonal affective disorder overlaid the clinical depression she suffered.
The occasional ‘‘senior moment’’ had developed into short-term memory loss. She wasted time looking for her keys, and forgot appointments.
‘‘This leaves an intelligent person like myself feeling embarrassed and frustrated.’’
She saw only a slow, relentless deterioration ahead. Through her life she had been a keen reader, alert and able to remember faces and names. She was losing that – and her confidence.
‘‘My daughter, who has noticed these lacunae, as well as other signs of deterioration is appalled, and so sad − that the vibrant mother she knows is going downhill in front of her very eyes...’’
Treadwell feared if her own eyesight got worse she would have to give up driving.
‘‘I have observed amongst my peers how because of lack of a car not only are their horizons reduced but that loss impacts HUGELY on that most precious of ‘gifts’ our AUTONOMY!!’’
At the time she wrote she had recently given up riding her bike. Treadwell loved walking, but by that stage, even with walking poles, she could last for 40 minutes at most.
University-educated, and having lived in many countries, Treadwell said her thirst for knowledge was still alive and kicking, but she lacked the energy to follow her interests.
‘‘My world is shrinking and I feel myself becoming boring and pitiful... and − once again − I feel foolish in company whereas before people would be keen to hear my input!’’
She felt as she got older she had become invisible, or was treated like a clueless child.
A son lived in Sydney, her daughter was closer but in the throes of changing careers and with the pull of a father also in a retirement home in a different city.
Treadwell wrote movingly about the loneliness of old age. ‘‘The lack of loving touching lies silently and bleakly in the background of my and others’ lives.’’
‘‘Both these sources of intimacy and touching have begun to fall away through the reluctance/fear of younger (AND middle aged) people to deal with older people.
‘‘And dare I mention that lack of the joy of loving sexual touching can also be a deep source of despair?’’
‘‘For older human beings it is not considered ‘seemly’ or even laughable for people of over 60 to talk about these pleasurable AND healing gifts we experienced when we we younger.
‘‘The silence on this topic is yet another way that makes us feel invisible. Not only the lack of human touching, but also the silence about its importance is doubly hurtful.’’
For five years she had spent two months a year in the Netherlands to be a loving daughter, seeing the decline of her adoptive mother. She didn’t want that to happen to her.
She had decided to move to a retirement home aged about 70, when she was still able to deal with the shift herself. At the home she found small rooms with a unit for bits and pieces to remind residents ‘‘of who they were’’.
‘‘One could say they are being ‘warehoused’ because our present legislation will not allow them to make their own choice when they still have the capacity to do so.’’
Looking after the frail elderly well meant consigning them to years of nothingness, with little joy and no hope, she said.
‘‘NO longer do their house, garden, clothes, membership of a church or clubs affirm who they are or were; they’re now just vulnerable ‘‘little oldies’’, with grey hair and glasses, having lost their individuality − at the mercy of the multitude of incrementally increasing ailments that afflict their bodies.’’
Her words raged against being refused autonomy in life and in the choice of death.
‘‘For instance the highly respected DUTCH Medical Association has approved ‘‘assisted dying’’ in certain circumstances and with boundaries and procedures that are agreed upon and respected by most GPs in that country, as well as now in the UK, Canada, and a growing number of states in America.’’
She didn’t want to be a burden on her family, having them dread phone calls about accidents and mishaps.
‘‘Just peace of mind that Mum is in the right place for the support she needs at this stage of her life. And PEACE OF MIND for me that I know I will not have to go on suffering for many more useless years!’’
Having volunteered to help the disabled over many years, she said she knew some of them too wanted to exercise their rights over their body and end their suffering.
The death notice for Treadwell said that she died peacefully at her home on June 6, 2016, less than five months after she had written her submission to the select committee.