The End in
Two Acts
The surgery went well. The doctors thought they got it all. But a CAT scan a year later showed that the melanoma had penetrated deep into the tissue. There was another surgery, and another CAT scan, and then a PET scan.
On Jan. 5, 2006, in his doctor’s office in Roseville, Tom and Dolores heard the results of that latest scan: The cancer had spread to his shoulder, into his lungs and was threatening to move to a lymph node beneath his jaw. Chemotherapy doesn’t work well in these cases, the doctor told him, and radiation is not much better. Tom had a year to live.
It took him only a few days to think through his situation. Tom was a take-charge guy. A 30-year career as an electronics technician, much of it in the aerospace industry, had taught him to look at problems dispassionately, find the elegant solution — simple, workable, quickly implemented — and then go to it. His terminal disease was the problem. His solution was simple: When the time came, he told his wife, his daughter and his son, when he felt he could no longer tolerate whatever the end-stage illness was doing to him, he would take matters into his own hands. He would end his life.