At the end of life, we need choices

Four years ago, my wife’s only sister died. This was a person who acted as a surrogate mother to my wife when she was very young. Betsy died alone, sitting in her garage inside her car, curled up next to an open propane tank.

She had been in terrible, horrific pain for many years, struggling with Parkinson’s disease. Her medications no longer provided relief from her tremors and seizures. The brain surgery that was supposed to give her 10 more good years gave her only one. She had just been diagnosed with breast cancer. So she decided to take her own life while she still had the faculty to do it.

Despite having a loving extended family, including two grown daughters, a grandson, two brothers and her sister, she asked no one for help or advice. She knew if she involved any of us in her decision, it could expose us to criminal charges. She couldn’t ask a doctor for help, either. Her only advice would come from the internet.

In a loving and humane world, this situation would never happen. I guarantee none of you would ever want to go through what my family had to go through.

Contrast this situation to the death of my friend’s mother last year in Denver. Colorado, like six other Western states, has a medical aid-in-dying law. Janet MacKenzie was 91 and had just been diagnosed with colon cancer that was predicted to be fatal within months. She recently had watched her husband die from cancer, and she decided she would rather pass on her own terms, still lucid, with her large, multigenerational family at her bedside.

All of her four children, their spouses and her grandchildren were with her,

holding her hands, during her final moments. She had been previously prescribed a humane and effective dose of medicine to cause her death at the time of her own choosing, as opposed to her trying to come up with some half-baked, homemade method involving a pill hoard, a tank of gas or a gun.

In the upcoming state legislative session, House Bill 47, the Elizabeth Whitefield End-of-Life-Options Act, will be introduced, debated and hopefully passed by the Legislature. This will be the third time since 2017 that a similar bill has been introduced in the New Mexico Legislature. I strongly urge the Legislature to pass this bill so families in this state are spared much of the pain my family had to endure. Moreover, I am asking all New Mexicans to contact their state representatives and senators to urge them to vote for this legislation.