Small Town in the Style of Joh Done Again
I met the Québécois filmmaker Claude Jutra in 1963, when he visited McMaster University for a showing of his first characteristic, À tout prendre. Years later on, when I was the film critic at Maclean's magazine, I visited Jutra on several occasions in Montreal, and he invited me to preview his flick Mon oncle Antoine prior to its release. In 1982, he read an idealistic commodity I'd written about assisted dying. He had been diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's and wanted help to end his life, but I put him off. I couldn't bring myself to convert my words into actions. Jutra's condition deteriorated until at concluding he had to human activity alone. On Nov 5, 1986, he leapt from the Jacques Cartier Bridge in Montreal. Punishing winter weather surrounded him: fog, icy rain and snow. The desperation of his suicide altered me in ways I did not fully realize at the time.
Five years after his death, I established the Correct to Die Society of Canada. I was a reluctant activist, and initially, I invested my energy in law reform. In 1992, the Society initiated a challenge under the Lease of Rights and Freedoms on behalf of Sue Rodriguez, the Victoria woman who had been diagnosed with ALS at historic period 41. We attempted to strike down Section 241(b) of the Criminal Code, which fabricated assisted suicide a criminal offence. The Supreme Courtroom of Canada rejected the challenge in a v–4 ruling. It would be many years earlier it would accept a comparable challenge—I foresaw a painful futurity for thousands of Canadians.
I was horrified anew in 1999 when the gifted conductor Georg Tintner, who was dying from a rare form of melanoma, jumped from the balcony of his 11th-floor apartment in Halifax to end his agony. Many Canadians would hear such news, milkshake their heads, utter a few sympathetic platitudes and move on. But I couldn't just sit back and wring my hands. That yr, I went from advocating for assisted suicides to facilitating them. Let'due south not mince words: I killed people who wanted to die.
Nothing in my background prepared me for what needed to be washed. I'd heard numerous horror stories about people who relied upon advice from exercise-it-yourself suicide books, such every bit Derek Humphry's Final Get out: The Practicalities of Self-Deliverance and Assisted Suicide for the Dying. He prescribed a plastic bag over the head to hasten death. That technique often created so much discomfort that many people failed.
I created an secret assisted death service that offered innovative non-medical methods of dying to Society members. My partner was Evelyn Martens, a retired office worker who'd watched her blood brother die in agony from bone cancer (she died in 2011). Following Jack Kevorkian's example, we didn't crave clients to pay for our services. Nosotros operated on the Robin Hood principle: members who could beget to embrace the costs of our illegal operations helped recoup for those who couldn't.
All of this took place in secret. Betwixt 1999 and 2001, we provided eight members of the Society with assisted deaths. The celebrated Canadian poet Al Purdy was 1 of them, and he authorized me to publish this posthumous account. The question of when, he left to my discretion. "You write it. Yous bundled everything. Wouldn't be possible without yous," he said in his famous gravelly voice. "I don't listen a flake being labelled a suicide."
Due westhen Al Purdy joined the Correct to Die Social club in 1997, I had long been familiar with his piece of work and his place in the CanLit firmament. Back in the early 1970s, when I was at Maclean'due south, Purdy had written a series for the magazine exploring West Coast life. Our professional person paths crossed again subsequently, when we both wrote for Weekend and The Canadian magazines. Al received the Right to Die Guild's news bulletins and our quarterly magazine, Concluding Rights. In early 1999, he wrote to me requesting a private visit. At historic period 81, he was gravely sick with metastasized lung cancer, among other ailments: severe arthritis, peripheral neuropathy and atrial fibrillation, plus what he chosen "that Biblical prophet age." He was worried nearly how his life might stop.
Al and his wife, Eurithe, had taken to spending one-half the year on Vancouver Island and the other half at the A-frame house they'd built in Ameliasburgh, in Prince Edward County. When nosotros met at his wintertime home well-nigh Sidney, B.C., he was emaciated and pale, but he still had a sharp mind and peachy sensitivity. He had shone brightly every bit a creative force for decades; now, with his energy in steep decline and pain intensifying, it was dusk time.
Al told me he wanted to die, the sooner the amend. Eurithe did non fully share his views; it was only when she left the room that he spoke candidly. "She wants to explore all avenues of survival," he told me. "But nothing is going to relieve me. I'thou fed up with dying slowly." I mentioned that another poet, P. K. Folio, was too a supportive fellow member of the Society. Al responded: "Knowing Pat, I'm not surprised."
Nosotros discussed the novelist Margaret Laurence, one of Al's close friends. At her death, in 1987, the media reported that she had died of lung cancer. X years after, James King, in his biography The Life of Margaret Laurence, revealed that she had actually taken her own life using information provided past the Hemlock Order, a right-to-dice organization in the United States. In an interview, Rex said that some of Laurence's friends were opposed to the revelation of the true cause of her death. Apparently they regarded suicide equally a sign of shameful weakness.
In mid-1999, equally Al's wellness failed and his energy waned, his notes to friends became shorter and more poignant, suffused with the recognition of his numbered days. To his friend Margaret Atwood, he wrote: "I go into hospital June 21, surgery side by side mean solar day. I promise and await to come up out of it, only you lot never know. Unknown state. I've had a lot of respect for yous over a long period of time…. And so if I don't come out of this surgery session as 'expected,' your ain eventual arrival will be attended with drums and flutes, welcoming signs. Love, Al."
The next fourth dimension I saw him, in early on 2000, he was in much worse shape. "I hesitate to suggest my death very strongly in the face of my wife'southward resistance," he had written in a letter. "Every solar day is agonizing. I'm fed up with suffering," he told me afterwards. In the intervening yr, equally a concession to Eurithe, he had tried vitamin therapy and other dietary treatments in which he had no organized religion. After all his efforts failed, he made a firm conclusion to end his life. Eurithe seemed willing to comply.
Past the fourth dimension Al approached me, I had spent years researching how to end a person'southward life in a quick, painless and spiritually pleasing way. I worked with engineers, physicians and right-to-die activists similar Derek Humphry to develop these methods—we called our organization NuTech. Along with the late Gordon Smith, head of a diving equipment manufacturing visitor in Port Moody, I had adult a helium method, which involved placing an "exit handbag" over a person'due south head, pulling a drawstring and inflating the bag with the inert gas. When Al asked about the method I'd employ, I suggested he might begin past drinking a glass of his favourite vino laced with Rohypnol, a stiff benzodiazapine that's well-nigh 10 times stronger than Valium. It's tasteless, colourless and quick acting. In addition to its sleep-inducing hypnotic effects, Rohypnol rapidly reduces feelings of anxiety. It'south the perfect medication for an assisted death.
In Europe, Rohypnol is a widely prescribed allaying. In the United States and Canada, it has been branded a date-rape drug. Information technology is banned in the U.Due south., and in Canada, a person may possess a pocket-sized corporeality obtained outside the state with a strange dr.'s prescription. I had in my possession a big supply of Rohypnol obtained through a boyfriend correct-to-die activist in France. Since I was already violating the law by assisting suicide, possessing illegal drugs to ensure a more than pleasant death seemed to add little additional take chances.
With Rohypnol in his system, Al would pass out in minutes and have no further awareness. I recommended he do this in individual with Eurithe; he would thus exist anesthetized during the cursory clinical procedure of assisted expiry. I viewed my actions not equally defying Canadian law but rather as placing ourselves into the future—setting an example of how information technology was possible to die in a voluntary, compassionate mode. My allegiance was to Al Purdy and his wishes, not to the preservation of outmoded laws or the hypocrisies of Canadian politicians.
The maximum penalty for assisted suicide was fourteen years in prison house. I was raising the stakes: by giving Al a pre-expiry sedative, my deportment could exist construed not equally assisted suicide but every bit premeditated, first-degree murder, with a mandatory life sentence. Looking into his eyes, respecting his intellect, hearing his wishes repeated over time, knowing him to be an independent person and thinker, I needed no further assurance that he, in a rational state, had authorized me to exist his agent and partner in catastrophe his life. All he would have to do was sip his wine and say farewell to the dear of his life, while his favourite music played quietly in the background. I felt honoured that he delegated the technical details to me.
I told Al that Gordon Smith and I had adult another method, called a "debreather." Gordon manufactured rebreathers, which procedure the exhaled jiff of a diver, remove the carbon dioxide and return to the diver a purified air supply (with additional oxygen). I asked him if a modified version could be fabricated, capable of causing death without discomfort. A debreather, as I envisioned it, would absorb carbon dioxide but not add more than oxygen; a person would inhale a rising level of the inert gas nitrogen and declining levels of oxygen. Equally long as i tin can continue to breathe, there is no discomfort. The oxygen declines; the person passes out. A debreather provides a comfy death inside 30 minutes.
Gordon had created prototypes that didn't piece of work properly—one overheated the air as it scrubbed carbon dioxide—merely, I told Al, we finally had a working model: compact, lightweight, comfortable and lethal. The debreather had been deployed several times in assisted suicides in 1999 in the U.S. and worked precisely as Gordon had predicted. I showed Al the latest model. Each unit cost $250 for parts; Gordon did not charge for his labour. I likewise offered to prove Al a brusque video of another Right to Die fellow member trying out the debreather and saying that he found it comfortable.
"This is all good news to me," Al said. "Merely why practise you do information technology?" At outset, I wasn't certain what to say. There's a great deal of suffering in the earth about which I could do nothing, but there's one critical area, at the end of life, where I could assistance.
I told him nigh Georg Tintner's decease and how information technology had affected me profoundly. If simply he had known how to find me. I'grand non assuming he'd have wanted an assisted death, simply at least he'd take had a selection, I told Al. I had bought all of Tintner's Bruckner recordings and listened repeatedly to each symphony in a room with simply a few candles. Al smiled. I knew that he, a declared atheist, had his own intense experiences when he listened to his collection of spirituals by Paul Robeson and Mahalia Jackson. "People similar Georg became a permanent function of my consciousness," I said. "They helped define my purpose. As do y'all."
Al looked thoughtful. Finally, he said: "I'm very interested. You're the only one who talks to me like this." He told me he had fabricated up his heed: he would entrust me with his expiry. A option between methods was his last decision: he chose Rohypnol and helium. Sedation appealed to him.
In the final weeks of his life, perhaps comforted to know that a worrisome event had been resolved, Al seemed more relaxed. He wasn't passively making peace with death. Far from information technology—he was denying expiry its sting, rejecting its indifference to him. Being mortal did not hateful he had to take prolonged suffering, or take his life micromanaged by the medical profession or the government.
Nosotros agreed on the date: Thursday, April 20, 2000. A few days beforehand, we discussed the pros and cons of revealing the details of his expiry. There were three options. First, nosotros could go far appear that he'd had a natural decease—that he'd passed abroad in his sleep. I idea at that place was a 99 per cent take a chance a coroner would buy it, due to Al'south age and advanced affliction.
2d, he could announced to accept committed suicide on his own. I described how a adult female we'd helped who was dying from ovarian cancer had followed such a scenario. Although she was suffering greatly, it was implausible that she would die in her sleep. She was considerably younger than Al, and her middle was audio. I suggested nosotros create the impression that she died solitary by her own hand.
She ingested a modest amount of a wearisome-acting barbiturate she had obtained in United mexican states. I and then gave her Rohypnol, which put her quickly to sleep. In one case she passed out, helium was administered, chop-chop causing her death. Gordon provided a minor high-pressure helium tank. Evelyn, Gordon and I all wore plastic gloves and paper booties over our shoes. We made certain there was no trace of our visit. We had parked discreetly in a garage under the house.
Her husband wanted to be with her throughout, just we advised him to get out before we began and obtain timed receipts from various sources (ATM, supermarket). When the husband returned, we left, and he called 911. He was subsequently questioned by the RCMP; officers were satisfied when he produced receipts showing he had not been nowadays during the time his wife supposedly took her life. No farther questions were asked.
I wanted to create the impression that she intended to take her own life. She wrote a suicide note that we placed on the bed beside a copy of Final Exit and an emptied box of Mexican pills. A regular non-helium exit bag was left around her caput. These items were props. If an autopsy were performed, the small amount of barbiturate in her tum should exist sufficient to convince a coroner that she had followed the classic formula of Final Exit. I wanted to conceal the true crusade of death then that the helium method would remain unknown and no suspicion of assisted suicide would arise. I successfully followed this scenario on two subsequent occasions.
I told Al he might consider a third pick—one that was deliberately provocative. Immediately after his death, I could tell the authorities exactly what had transpired. This might well atomic number 82 to criminal prosecution; I was willing to stand up trial for his death if such a trial might pb to police reform. The downside of full disclosure, besides possible incarceration, would be that I would be unable to help anyone else—and I believed at that place would be many Canadians in the years ahead who would want my help. I knew of no one else in Canada who offered agile terminate-of-life assistance to those who desired to die on their own terms. This third pick would end what I considered an essential service, provoke an investigation into Al's expiry and crusade Eurithe distress on height of her grief.
We discussed each option. Eurithe preferred giving the impression that Al had died in his sleep. She was not in favour of any plan that involved controversy, police or a media frenzy.
The concluding conclusion was Al's. He deferred to Eurithe'south sensitivities, and we agreed that nosotros would phase his dying every bit a natural consequence at his home on Vancouver Island.
Odue north the evening of April 20, 2000, Al Purdy drank a drinking glass of Chilean wine laced with Rohypnol. Murphy's Law offered one terminal demonstration of its quirky power: the wine was corked. He sipped it anyway, in the company of his love of nigh sixty years. There was no blitz, no timetable. The last piece of music he heard was Paul Robeson's all-time rendition of "Ol' Homo River"—his favourite vocalizer performing 1 his favourite songs.
During that final communion, Al passed out. Soon after, Eurithe left his bedside, walked downwardly the hall and entered the living room. Evelyn and I went into the bedroom. I gently pinched Al's peel at various places; at that place was no response. The only sound was his slowed breathing. I waited for his unconsciousness to deepen.
We worked as a team, silently, efficiently. We had brought two helium tanks in bulky boxes labelled "party airship kits." Evelyn placed them beside Al'southward bed. She attached plastic tubing to a Y-connectedness joined to both tanks, so the contents would feed simultaneously into a plastic bag. Our exit bag was 56 centimetres past 91 centimetres, with rubberband sewn into a flannelette collar; a Velcro strip was used to seal the bag snugly effectually the neck.
Evelyn placed the exit bag around Al's forehead, and I inflated it with helium. I waited a few minutes longer, nonetheless pinching his skin to make sure he was deeply sedated. The inflated bag rose to a higher place his head like a chef'due south chapeau. It had to be fully inflated before being pulled downward to minimize available oxygen. Evelyn pulled the purse downward over his caput and sealed the neckband. I increased the helium menstruum.
The body shows no agin reaction to pure helium. It responds equally if the person is breathing normal air, except that the lack of oxygen causes the brain to blackness out inside seconds. Al took a deep breath, and his body went limp. After two or three minutes, he seemed to depict a final breath, but this may have been purely reflexive. I allowed both tanks to empty into the get out bag. Then nosotros removed the tanks and put them dorsum in Evelyn'south van for disposal. We had chosen a secluded dumpster in advance, 1 with no surveillance cameras.
On the way out, effectually 11 p.yard., I stopped to speak with Eurithe, who was dwelling house deeply in her own thoughts and feelings. (A family unit member was nowadays to comfort her.) I nodded and said, "It went well." I did not need to remind her that, in the morning time, she was to telephone call 911, equally if she had just woken to discover her husband's lifeless body. No questions were raised. The media reported that Al Purdy died in his sleep from lung cancer.
His assisted expiry was the fifth of eight that Evelyn and I provided. The poet Susan Musgrave, who knew Al well, wrote of his final months: "Al looked at death the same way he has e'er looked at life—correct between the optics." That was my impression as well.
Eurithe, Al and I agreed to conceal the true cause of Al's death for an unspecified time; in that location was no intention to create a permanent falsehood. I favoured concealment for one reason only: I wanted to see our assisted death service continue for equally many years as possible. Had my life'south work remained in my command, I would accept continued to help people dice. However, in 2002, Evelyn Martens was charged with 2 counts of assisted suicide involving women about whom I knew cypher. As a result of having our role located in Evelyn's home, all of our initiatives collapsed. All records, including membership and mailing lists, correspondence, and all supplies—even postage stamps—were seized and never returned to me (I could hardly inquire nigh them without raising suspicion). A bequest of nearly $l,000 from a Correct to Die member in Nova Scotia disappeared without whatever accounting. The service that provided bully comfort to Al Purdy, a man sometimes called the Voice of the Country, was no longer bachelor to the balance of the land.
It was two years before Evelyn's trial began. In November 2004, she was acquitted for lack of evidence. But the regime' awareness made it impossible to revive our assisted decease service. Since then, many Canadians take suffered greatly, trying to have a meaningful choice in dying. They include such prominent names every bit Donald Low, the Mountain Sinai microbiologist who died from a brain tumour in 2013; Gloria Taylor, the ALS patient from B.C. who petitioned the government for her right to die; and Kathleen Carter, a woman suffering from degenerative spinal stenosis, whose federal claiming finally convinced the Supreme Court to lift the ban on assisted death. Each left a message on the wall of human suffering. Each sought an assisted expiry. Some received publicity, but Canada denied them the help that we were able to provide Al Purdy.
Last year, while preparing this account of Al's death, I consulted two lawyers, one a widely respected good on ramble aspects of criminal law. There's no statute of limitations in our Criminal Code. Nor is there recognition of "euthanasia" or "mercy killing." I was told that, upon publication of this article, I could exist arrested and charged with crimes ranging from assisted suicide to outset-degree murder. If charged, I would immediately lose my passport. If bail was prohibitively high, I could languish in jail indefinitely. Nether current Canadian law, at that place'south no credible difference between me and killers such as Robert Pickton, Paul Bernardo and Clifford Olson.
In February 2015, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled unanimously that a general prohibition of physician-assisted suicide was unconstitutional. It violated the rights of "competent adults who are suffering intolerably as a result of a grievous and irremediable medical condition." Within a few months, there will exist systems in place to help people achieve a good decease in Canada. I volition not exist here to see it. At age 78, I have been diagnosed with two terminal illnesses (pulmonary fibrosis and prostate cancer) and an unstable center. As I complete this article in February 2016, I have learned that, for the third fourth dimension in vi years, the electric organization of my heart has become unstable, and I may demand a third ablation process. I've had undiagnosed rectal bleeding daily for two months. My quality of life has disintegrated.
On February 23, I will fly to Switzerland to die. The latitude of Swiss law appeals to me—laypersons are permitted to help voluntary deaths—and I wish to cease my life in the company of expert people. By the time this story is published, I will exist expressionless. Every day that I am able to write, I piece of work on completing a book, The Hereafter of Decease: True Stories About Assisted Dying, to be published as an e-book by Canadian Humanist Publications after my death. It's the last best matter I can do to give Canadians a deeper understanding of right-to-die events during the terminal 25 years.
I vest to Eternal Spirit, an organization near Basel, Switzerland, that provides voluntary assisted expiry services to foreigners. They've vetted me on medical grounds for a legally assisted death. I've called Eternal Spirit because its founder, Dr. Erika Preisig, developed an innovative Iv infusion technique for the barbiturate Natrium-Pentobarbital, which causes a peaceful passing within a few minutes. I have an iPad app that counts downwardly the time I take left. Dr. Michael Irwin, a respected effigy in the right-to-die motility in England and a one-time medical director at the United nations, has offered to be with me and to pay half of Eternal Spirit's costs, which total effectually $10,000. A trust in Switzerland related to Eternal Spirit will pay the remaining half. I bought a $1,200 circular trip fare to Basel—a return ticket looks better equally one passes through the scrutiny of officialdom.
Anytime, doctors will offer assisted death services much more sophisticated than anything I created. Providing others with humane deaths at a time of their choosing will be seen as an important public service. I imagine a time when the progressive features of Al Purdy's death will go end-of-life options for all Canadians. My actions volition be considered unremarkable.
Editor's note: John Hofsess died at 4:45 p.m. EST on February 29, 2016, every bit planned, in Basel, Switzerland.
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Source: https://torontolife.com/life/john-hofsess-assisted-suicide/
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