The End in
Two Acts
Then he closed his eyes and fell asleep. Within a few minutes, he was unconscious. Within 10 minutes he stopped breathing. Dr. Gideonse felt for his pulse and found none, listened for his heartbeat and heard none. Downstairs, Allison felt a change in the air pressure in the room, as if someone had opened a window.
It was January 2007, a year and a half after David Bradley’s death, a year after Tom McDonald’s diagnosis. Tom’s Compassion & Choices counselor, Helen, had been e-mailing him. She was concerned that she had not heard from him, concerned that he was not beginning to take the steps that would allow him to control his own death. Tom hadn’t followed up.
Partly that was because, to his great surprise, he had not been experiencing significant pain. Although his lungs were so compromised that a slow walk from his deck to his living room left him breathless, he wasn’t in agony like his mother had been in agony. If he wasn’t in agony, then everything was OK. If he wasn’t in agony, then perhaps he wasn’t really dying. When the time comes, he said to himself, I’ll do something.
He knew it wasn’t that simple, but he hadn’t allowed himself to think about just how hard it really would be. He didn’t want to think about it, and no one but Helen, in an occasional e-mail, was pushing him to think about it. Helen had told him about how he would have to stockpile drugs, but it hadn’t really sunk in that he would need to fill three separate prescriptions over the course of more than two months.