The End in
Two Acts
The night before, though, had been bad. Lots of coughing, little sleep. He awoke furious at the cancer growing in his throat.
Allison organized a ritual on the spot. It seemed that so much of these past weeks were about rites and rituals, about constructing small ceremonies and homey celebrations. Knowing the end was so near, and that they could plan for it, freighted everything they did with meaning. That morning Allison organized a quick trip to a bucolic patch of land just outside the city. There they built a small fire, and David burned all the tissues he had used the night before. He stood before the blaze and yelled, flicking his eagle feather, again and again, as if directing the anger out of his body and into the fire. That night, he hardly coughed at all.
But soon he was coughing again, a combination of not being able to swallow and, it turned out, a case of pneumonia. The last thing David wanted was to be in a hospital, to die in a hospital. But he had to go. It was there in the hospital that he realized he was running out of time. Soon he would be too sick or too weak to self-administer the lethal drugs. He needed to make his first request under the Oregon law to get the process going. Dr. Gideonse was called in to see if David “qualified.” Did he indeed have a six-month or less prognosis? Was he mentally competent? Did he understand all his options?