Helping mother choose her final path

May 27, 2010|Karen Campbell

When she was a child, Zoe FitzGerald Carter often grappled with the idea of death. However, her musings were less about what happens after we die than the process itself. “I drove my family crazy asking: Would you rather be shot or burned? Drowned or hung? Dropped from an airplane or left in the desert with no water?’’

In Carter’s autobiographical “Imperfect Endings: A Daughter’s Tale of Life and Death,’’ it is the author’s mother, Margaret, who is struggling with the best (i.e., most efficient, less painful) ways to die, and not just theoretically. Diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease and failing quickly from its devastating effects, she contemplates ending her life with more grace and less pain than the malady is likely to afford. Her ponderings tend toward questioning the virtues of morphine vs. Seconal. One doctor assures her that starvation is relatively painless, that as the body fasts, one actually stops being hungry and starts to feel calm and clearheaded.

However, though it is Margaret’s end-of-life dilemma, it is Carter’s story, as her mother engages her and her two sisters into the protracted process of choosing how and when to die, setting up the moral, ethical, and legal issues of assisted suicide. And then there is the emotional upheaval — when Carter begins her tale, it has been more than a year with several changes of dates, prompting one sister, Katherine, to decide she’s not going to be a part of the “deathbed watch.’’

What could have been a rather morbid and grim account is actually quite an engaging and insightful tale of familial love, understanding, and forgiveness, shot through with a surprising amount of wit. As Carter chronicles her mother’s difficult journey, shuttling herself back and forth between her family in Berkeley, Calif., and her mother’s house in Washington, D.C., she revisits with Margaret many of the important and telling moments of their lives, including her father’s death seven years prior. “No one expected him to die. . . . He was a force of nature, an original, a man of so many talents and so much vitality, it seemed he would live forever.’’ Yet his big personality was fueled in part by years of alcoholism masked by social gregariousness, which took its toll on the sisters. Margaret enabled with denial, claiming that “he always held it so well. I guess I thought that meant he wasn’t a true alcoholic.’’