How We Die. With dignity, I hope. Thanks, Dr. Nuland

Throughout my adult existence, I have given death a great deal of thought--perhaps more, way more, than how much the average person thinks about it.  One needs to go no farther than this blog itself to get an idea of how much I think and read about it--like these that are tagged with "death."  Of course, there are also quite a few posts tagged with "life."

That there are so many posts about death, and life, should not be a surprise--death is, after all, a part of life. Life comes to an end--it is only a case of when, not if.  Understanding and appreciating death is a powerful route to understanding and appreciating life itself. On this, I got a valuable piece of help almost two decades ago, from Sherwin Nuland's How We Die.

This book came out soon after I was done with graduate school and had joined the "real world" in California.  Life was changing rapidly. I read this book. I was blown away by it. All my thoughts about death which had been nebulous until then all of a sudden made sense. I knew that I wanted to die with dignity when death came knocking.  And thus came about the instructions to the family on my preferences for end of life care.

I talked about it with the attorney friend.  I told him that I thought the worst of all was Alzheimer's.  Funny he always was, and his comeback was hilarious: "With Alzheimer's, it is not your problem but somebody else's problem."

I read in the Twitter feed that Sherwin Nuland died. I meant what I said in my re-tweet:

MT his book taught me a lot About life itself. “@robinlloyd99: Sherwin B. Nuland, ‘How We Die’ Author, Dies at 83 / http://t.co/7SxQPm7Xlb
— sriram khe (@congoboy) March 5, 2014

It is now almost twenty years since I read that book. I live in a different state, Oregon, which was the pioneer with the "Death with Dignity" legislation. Of course, that is not the reason why I moved to this state but, nonetheless, it is of great comfort to me that if the Grim Reaper gives me an advance notice of his visit, then I might be able to exit the stage on my own terms.

It is an ironic coincidence that my first ever op-ed after moving to Oregon was about the Death with Dignity Act, because Bush and his fundamentalist attorney general, Ashcroft, wanted to get rid of this.  While that op-ed, and the gazillion blog posts here on death, never ever mentioned Sherwin Nuland, I owe him a great deal for helping me get a better and clearer idea of that inevitability that we all face-death.

I was certain that Compassion and Choices would have an obit about Nuland. (I have been a paying supporter on and off.)  Sure enough, they do:

“Dr. Nuland was heroic in bringing conversations about dying out of the closet. He openly acknowledged medically assisted dying exists in states like Connecticut where it is considered illegal. Our own fight is to legalize aid in dying and bring a surreptitious practice into the open, where it is safe and accessible to everyone,” said Compassion & Choices President Barbara Coombs Lee, a former ER and ICU nurse and physician assistant who coauthored the nation’s first death-with-dignity law in Oregon.
“Like so many of my colleagues, I have more than once broken the law to ease a patient’s going, because my promise, spoken or implied, [to do everything possible to provide an easy death] could not be kept unless I did so,” Dr. Nuland wrote in “How to Die” (see pages 242-243)
“Dr. Nuland learned from his brother’s death from colon cancer that physicians who urge futile treatments on patients with incurable, terminal diseases often cause great suffering,” concluded Coombs Lee. “Ultimately, Dr. Nuland died as most doctors do, peacefully in his own home. He understood the end was near and opted to die gently in the loving arms of his family. And most Americans want to follow his example.”

Way to go, Dr. Nuland; thanks!

Click here to learn about the efforts underway in different states to make Death with Dignity legal.