Dying on her own terms
Terminally ill woman treasured last days with help from California law
Gabriella Walsh knew she wanted to die on a Saturday. She’d settled on July 16, dressing that morning in a flower crown and a T-shirt with a picture of a dragonfly.
Earlier, friends and family nuzzled up against her. Rest easy, they said, and keep wandering.
“I just feel like I’m going on a trip,” she said calmly.
Within two hours, she would drink a fatal dose of medications prescribed under California’s death-with-dignity law, which allows some terminally ill patients to request drugs to end their lives.
The option had given her comfort in her final weeks — as had knowing that, in the end, she’d have Jack Barsegyan, the registered nurse who managed her hospice care, and Jill Schock, a death doula, at her bed.
“My Jack and Jill,” she often called them.
Born Gabriela del Carmen Torres Acosta
in 1958, death was, perhaps, her earliest memory.
When she was 2, she stumbled upon her grandfather slumped lifeless in their family home in Quillota, Chile. Five years later, her father asked her to let their hug linger during their bedtime ritual, sensing it might be their last.
He died of a stroke within hours, and his body was transported home from the hospital, as was the custom then. She dragged a chair next to her father’s body, covered by a sheet. She sat with him for what felt like an hour.
“I had no fear,” she recalled. “I was neutral.”
As a teen, she and her mother moved from Chile to Sherman Oaks, California, where they reunited with Gabriella’s oldest sister. She now had a new home, a new language and a slightly new name — “Gabriella” with two Ls after officials misspelled it on immigration paperwork.
After graduating from Van Nuys High School, she got a job as a medical assistant helping a podiatrist who worked at convalescent homes. The patients often looked unkempt and rarely had visitors. “That’s not how I want to have my last days,” she thought, then 19.
Before long, a co-worker introduced Gabriella to her brother, who became Gabriella’s husband for a time. When she was 23, she gave birth to a girl she named after actor Natalie Wood.
Through the years, she worked
in advertising, as a personal assistant and, later in life, as an interpreter and translator.
She was long guided by a spirit of wanderlust — a word she had tattooed onto her left wrist in her late 50s. She rarely considered the future or the longer-term impacts of quick decisions — her allegiance was to the now and the immediate next. No matter where she was, she always itched for new adventure and opportunity.
“If there was a chance of something — some connection, some job, some friendship — it was, ‘I’m in. I’m all in,’ ” recalled her longtime friend Kathy Menzie.
Her purest joy came in 2003, when her daughter picked her up at Los Angeles International Airport after Gabriella had spent several months working in Melbourne, Australia. The moment she first locked eyes with her granddaughter, then 3 months old, felt transcendent.
By fall 2021, Gabriella had retired. On Dec. 9, she went in for a routine mammogram and, minutes later, a radiology oncologist was explaining that aggressive cancer in her right breast had “blown out” to her lymph nodes.
The words looped in her mind. She sobbed alone in her car.
With her plan to move out of her current residence in motion, she needed to find a new place. An old friend offered to let her stay at his home for a few months.
A PET scan showed tumors on her spine, sternum and hip.
Fifteen in total — now officially bone cancer, her oncologist explained in March. She recalled the oncologist saying he thought she had six to eight months to live. Hormone therapy might slow the progression.
She didn’t want to extend her life, she told him, but to prioritize the quality of the time she had left. In her final months, she shared freely with family and friends about her decision to pursue California’s End of Life Option Act. The law makes California one of only 10 states, as well as the District of Columbia, to permit medical aid in dying.
The decision gave her a profound peace — a final freedom that she hoped would one day be afforded to people in every state.
“My life, my body, my death,” she said. “It’s just my time.”
The first days after her diagnosis felt like a fog. She learned to steady herself with a cane, knowing that even a short fall could shatter her brittle bones, and she reflected on life lessons that had long eluded her — the way she struggled to manage money and how hard she found it to assert her own needs if she thought it would let someone else down.
She caught up with relatives in Chile and began drafting notes to family members she still had unresolved feelings toward. She sometimes craved sopaipillas, a doughy treat commonly eaten on rainy days in Chile.
Friends flew in from Atlanta, Colorado and Spain, and locals
showed up with sushi and Krispy Kreme doughnuts and CBD oil for her aching knees. They laughed and cried.
“I’ve lived a magical life,” she said one afternoon in March. “What else can I ask of life?”
In April, she moved to the final address she’d call home. Menzie had offered to let her live for free in a studio adjacent to her stepfather’s home in Santa Paula. Menzie lived in a guest house next door.
Soon, the tumor on her hip stung so much it was hot to the touch, and when she lied down to watch TV, a mass along her spine squished like an about-toburst water balloon. Her painkillers constipated her so badly that the discomfort triggered anxiety attacks. Her hospice team upped the dosage of her fentanyl patch, which helped.
A few days later, Schock visited. The death doula, 36, whom Gabriella hired to walk alongside her in her final months, used to work as a chaplain in an emergency room, but disliked the realm of sudden death. Cancer was unrelenting — she’d watched it kill her own father in 2015
— but at least patients had the chance to say goodbye.
“What are you doing with this time to get joy out of life?” Schock asked Gabriella.
Walking along the beach sounded taxing, but she would enjoy sitting by the waves. And after a few days of wanting to be alone, she felt up for visitors.
“It’s OK to be more antisocial,” Schock told her. “That’s actually a part of the dying process.”
Gabriella was still experiencing nuggets of joy — a meal at Nobu in Malibu, seeing Dave Chappelle at the Hollywood Bowl, the friend who knew she ran cold and mailed her an electric blanket.
But she didn’t like where her mind went when she was alone. Detached and exhausted, listening to music became painful, transporting her to lighter times. She often fixated on not wanting to burden the people in her life, fearful of asking for too much. And yet, she wanted more — more visits and calls and connections. Feeling disconnected from her dying body, she removed her fentanyl patch for a week. “I needed to feel,” she said. Every inch of her frame ached and scrubbing shampoo into her scalp exhausted her. She pulled up the calendar on her phone and called Schock.
“I’m having a really hard time just waiting around,” she told her. “Can I set a date?”
All the paperwork had gone through; she could set any day now. She picked July 16. Until then, she felt as if she was traveling on standby — now, she said, she knew when she had to board.
A few mornings later, her friend Rebecca Rincon visited with two bottles of prosecco.
Rincon wondered aloud if Gabriella believed in an afterlife. She’d gone back and forth through the years, Gabriella said, but now she didn’t think she did.
“I really feel that once I fall asleep, it’s lights out.”
If I ever get a free drink from a stranger at a bar, Rincon told her, I’ll know it’s you. Gabriella’s eyes twinkled.
Small moments like these always felt to Gabriella like a living funeral, an opportunity to listen in on the things loved ones might normally save for a eulogy.
On July 16, Barsegyan asked if she was feeling any anxiety. About a 5 out of 10, she said, so he gave her something to calm her nerves. When he walked up minutes later holding a small, red vial, he reminded her that she didn’t have to drink the medication, but that if she did, it would end her life. She nodded.
Schock fed her three spoonfuls of mango sorbet, which Gabriella had picked out several weeks earlier, knowing it would soothe her throat from the stinging medication. Barsegyan handed her the vial, and she put it to her lips, swigging it down in three confident pulls. She looked up at the ceiling, smiling softly.
She died at 1:38 p.m. She was 64.