A response to the death of Sue Rodriguez

Nancy J. Jones

Her name was Alice Winnifred; her friends called her Winnie. She was born just outside Calgary, not far from the sod hut that her grandmother lived in. As a child, she moved with her family to Agassiz, B.C., then to Vancouver.

Perhaps it was that she was the eldest of four girls, perhaps just that she inherited the genes of her father, but she was one of the most determined women I have known. She started work at 15, the best of secretaries in a world just beginning to use shorthand and typewriters. She married, and had five children over the span of 14 years.

She was involved in church work and missionary endeavours. She hosted families of missionaries while they waited to board freighter ships to China, sometimes for days or weeks at a time. She led church ladies' groups, and sent out hundreds of circular letters for missionaries every month. She held prayer meetings in her home the young people's prayer group, the China Inland Mission prayer group, the Mary and Martha prayer group and others.

She was a battleship in full steam. She ruled her house and loved her husband with an intensity that could not be measured. When she was 47, her husband died of heart disease; she was left with five children ranging in age from 9 to 23.

Three years later, she remarried, and the battleship steamed ahead.

Fifteen years after her second marriage, her world began to unravel. Her mother died; her husband developed Alzheimer's; she lost a special son-in-law to divorce, a sister to leukemia and a sister-in-law to heart disease all in the space of five years. The last blow was physical she was attacked in her underground parking lot by a young teen. He tried to snatch her purse, pushing her against a large garbage dumpster, smacking her skull and causing her a visit to the emergency department. Shortly after, her second husband died, and her health began to fail.

She started to fall for no apparent reason. She fell onto her knees on the boulevard, getting out of the car. She fell in the middle of the hallway. She fell forward into cupboards. On two occasions, she fell backwards from the top of 30 stairs she had successfully climbed, bouncing down to the bottom, once sustaining a fractured arm. She was assessed by several physicians, and eventually became resident of an intermediate care facility. One night, she began to have seizures, and she spent five days in hospital.

The neurologist diagnosed "progressive supra nuclear palsy". He told me three years. He told me she would either choke to death or contract pneumonia and be dead in three days. We discussed treatment of symptoms, and what "no code" means. He was one of those kind, gentle physicians that you never forget.

Within six months, she was in an extended care ward, which was to remain her home for five long years. She never gave up the battleship syndrome. She lost her speech, but she had a finger which shook at her children when she was displeased. She used it when her son forgot to send Christmas cheques to her ten grandchildren. She learned to communicate with grunts and hand squeezes. She learned how to laugh with a special grunting sound. She lost most of her sight. She was unable to write more than a scrawl. Eventually, she could not grasp a pen.

She choked on her food until a permanent tube was put into her stomach, so that she could be fed from a bag hanging beside her bed. She choked on coffee; she choked on tea; she choked on water; she even choked on saliva. Her teeth began to rot. There was a suction tube beside her bed, and her family learned to use it when she was in distress. Three of her children who lived nearby would visit her every week or more; her remaining two children travelled from across the country to see her whenever they could. She saw her three eldest grandchildren marry. She held her first four great-grandchildren. She graduated from a walker to a wheelchair to her bed.

One day the call came Winnie had pneumonia. Her three children spent time with her. Then they had a long midnight conference and made decisions about when they should make phone calls to faraway places and other siblings. They made financial plans. They made practical plans about where her belongings would stay until the rest of the family came to disperse them. She had already given her son three complete and different sets of funeral instructions.

She had pneumonia for two weeks. Her three children came daily to her bedside; they gathered her in their arms and told her they loved her; they washed her; they combed her hair; they suctioned her when she continued to spasm in her throat. The day she died, she was able to acknowledge their presence with a change in the intensity of her breathing—a last battleship effort to communicate. Then she lapsed into a coma. Eight hours later, she died.

Peaceful? Yes, within her spirit and soul. Dignity? Questionable but everyone tried very hard to keep her dignity intact. Love? Never without it. Pain? Yes, a lot of emotional pain, and certainly physical pain at the end. Frustration? Absolutely frustration that was only occasionally demonstrated during more than five long, hard years. During those years, did she ever long for death? Of course, she did, and she verbalized this longing many times. So did her children. But euthanasia? Not even considered.

The Scripture she asked for most was Job 19:25-27: "I know that my Redeemer lives, and that in the end He will stand upon the earth. And after my skin has been destroyed, yet in my flesh I will see God; I myself will see Him with my own eyes I, and not another."

Winnie went from a full life, in total control, to helplessness and total dependency. She gave others the privilege of demonstrating their love and care for her not just her family, but friends who visited regularly and the professionals who devote their working lives to ease the pain and suffering of all the Winnies in this world.

My heart is full of sympathy for those who think the only solution is immediate freedom from pain and the right to choose their time of death.

I watched her die for five long years. I would not give up a single moment of that time. She was my mother. I am her daughter, Nancy Jean.

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