Last Rights

How can it be that it’s legal to kill yourself, but a crime to help someone take her own life? Ruth Goodman’s recent posthumous letter to the Globe and Mail editors and Sandra Martin’s profile offer important perspectives on those questions. So if a person is that miserable, why doesn’t she simply go ahead and take her own life?

It turns out that it’s not so simple for people with serious disabilities. But neither is it an easy matter for those of us who in old age have become frail or have minor disabilities. Imagine this situation:

You are a seventy or eighty or ninety-year-old. Imagine that you have a disease that is physically painful. You cannot use the toilet or dress yourself without help. Your eyesight and hearing are both failing. Maybe you suffer from only one of these conditions, or you might have several more. Your mind works well, but you feel closer to death than to life. You decide to end your life, but now you are faced with the challenge of how to do it.

You want to ask your doctor to prescribe whatever will enable you to die at a time you choose. But you’re afraid if you ask for it, the doctor might try to hospitalize you. So you have to ask someone else what you need. But anyone who answers your questions could be arrested and jailed for assisting you.

The Internet might provide answers. But suppose you don’t know how to access it. Or your fingers are in too much pain or your vision too poor to make it feasible. You have heard that there are some areas where it is legal for doctors to give patients a drug that will help them die, under certain narrow circumstances. You wonder what they give to patients who choose to die and you call an organization that promotes death with dignity, and ask what substance those doctors prescribe. You are told that information can’t be given out.

Maybe you’ve heard of the Australian book that answers many of your questions, but it has been banned in that country, and you don’t know where it is available. If you somehow manage to find it, it will tell you what drug those doctors prescribe for the patients who qualify. If you can find a way to get the pills, you could mash them up, but how many do you need? You’re afraid you won’t be able to do it right. If it is difficult for you to swallow (a common problem with some illnesses) taking many pills will surely be a challenge. Midway through the process you might vomit or fall asleep.

But anyway, the book tells you it’s best to take the drug in liquid form. You feel as if you’re getting somewhere–until you encounter still another road block. Though the liquid form is available in a few countries it is not legal in Canada or the U.S. So you’re back to square one. But let’s say you manage somehow to acquire the liquid. The book says the seal on the bottle is hard to remove. If your hands are weak or curled up with arthritis, how will you open the bottle?

Those are just a few of the obstacles that legal and other institutions have put in the way of anyone who wants to take control of her death on her own terms. And even if you manage to overcome several of those barriers, you will almost certainly need help at one step or another. If you tell your children or close friends what you plan to do, they may be horrified, try to talk you out of it, hide information from you, and decline to help. And never mind that it is legal for you to take your life, if they do assist you, they will be subject to arrest and jail. Catch 22 is alive and well.

MY FRIEND IS DEAD BUT HER VALUES LIVE ON

         My beloved friend Ruth Goodman died yesterday at the age of ninety-one. Over the last fifty-three years, Ruth and I grew even closer and more important to each other than we were in the early days of our protesting the Vietnam War. So my loss is great, but mitigated by remembering Ruth’s dedicated activism in several political campaigns, including the movement for Death with Dignity. She died as she lived, true to her principles.

            

           It is one thing to say you will take your own life when the time is right. It is quite another to follow through and do it. The right to die with dignity was as important to Ruth as the other civil and human rights she had championed, so I felt confident that she would put her beliefs into action. When, shortly before her death, I wrote her obituary, she made sure I included the (anticipated) fact that right to the end she was in control of her death. It was my privilege to spend the last five days of Ruth's life with her, and the day before she died she wrote this letter to be sent to newspaper editors after her death:

I am a ninety-one-year-old woman who has decided to end my life in the very near future. I do not have a terminal illness; I am simply old, tired and becoming dependent, after a wonderful life of independence. People are allowed to choose the right time to terminate their animals’ lives and to be with them and provide assistance and comfort, right to the end. Surely, the least we can do is allow people the same right to choose how and when to end their lives. By the time people read this, I will have died. I am writing this letter to advocate for a change in the law so that all will be able to make this choice.

As far as the eye could see we were they only white folks present among for the Black Mambhzaza concert. Thousands of dancing, drinking, joyously welcoming black folks graciously welcomed us.

Ruth is dead, but her courageous work for Death with Dignity lives on.

We had heard numerous sad, infuriating stories about the way blacks were treated by the South African apartheid government, but there were many moments of joy as well, and Ruth had a smile on her face every day. She said this adventure in South African was the best of all her trips, and being part of the huge crowd that filled a soccer field to hear Black Mambhzaza's music was a welcome relief from the horrifying stories we had heard.

Ruth always said she wanted to "go out dancing" and she came might close to doing that.

People danced on rooftops and the hills around the field, and if you look closely you can see Ruth having the time of her life in the crowd. When she tired of dancing she wound up resting with someone's little boy by her side. I feel confident that she would like seeing this part of her wonderful life remembered here.

Obituary for Ruth Goodman

            Ruth Goodman has led a life of resistance to war, a commitment to the environment and social justice. Her family fled Eastern Europe at the turn of the last century to escape war and anti-Semitism. Ruth grew up in a union household, and in 1940 she married Henry Goodman. She found a job in the shipyards where, as a clerical worker, she was paid $20 a week. When she discovered that welders made $1.25 an hour she joined the wave of women’s participation in wartime industrial production.

            After the war, Ruth and Henry moved to Washington State, where Ruth gave birth to two sons, Michael and Dean. Soon she joined the American Friends Service Committee, organizing annual peace marches, and picketing the Boeing Company in protest of their manufacturing aircraft used in the Vietnam War.

            In 1966, worried about their sons becoming eligible for the draft in a few years, Ruth and Henry left the United States to settle in Vancouver, Canada. But their anti-war activism didn’t stop there. They offered U.S. draft resisters a safe haven in their home, and Ruth volunteered at the War Resisters’ support office. But her participation in political campaigns was not confined to international issues.

Through her personal experience of two illegal abortions in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Ruth developed a heightened awareness of the importance of a woman’s right to reproductive choice, including abortion. Her strong belief in the right to legal and safe access to abortion led her to be among the first volunteers for the Everywoman’s Health Centre, an abortion clinic.

Ruth’s life-long commitment to justice has made her a staunch advocate of the right to Death with Dignity, and she died true to her principles. With the support of her children and a host of devoted friends, at the age of ninety-one on February 2^nd, 2013, Ruth chose to end her life. She is survived by Michel Goodman and his partner Sharon Sjerven, Dean Goodman and his wife, Janna Levitt, as well as grandsons, Henry, Eric and Gabriel Goodman.

            To carry on his parents’ commitments to justice, Michael Goodman has established the Ruth and Henry Goodman Fund for Social and Economic Justice. Instead of flowers, donations may be made to that organization. http://ruthandhenrygoodmanfund.com/