Watching My Parents Die Convinced Me To Plan A Completely Different Path. My Idea Came From A Movie.

In the span of a couple of months, she broke both hips and fractured her shoulder, confining her to a wheelchair. Immobility and subpar care led to a gruesome pressure wound on her foot that her depleted, 65-pound body could never heal.

What kind of society insists on keeping a person alive in that condition? In her predementia days, my mom — always quick with a joke or a biting comment — would have said, “Just get a gun and shoot me.”

When Mom died last year, the day before Mother’s Day, I cried with both sorrow at her unfair, horrible ending and with relief that it was finally over. Yet, the nagging question remained about my own uncertain future.

Caring for my parents, I’d become increasingly obsessed with the idea that I was doomed to spend my final years in a dreary care facility surrounded by strangers, just waiting for the end to come. While I realize that having kids does not guarantee that they will someday take care of you, I also know that there is a zero percent chance that your nonexistent offspring will do it. This thought filled me with a crushing sense of fear and foreboding about getting older. That is, until I resolved to plan my own death.

The idea surfaced gradually from some hidden cranny of my subconscious, reminding me of my favorite movie since high school: “Harold and Maude.” In this 1971 dark comedy starring the great Ruth Gordon, a morbid young man falls in love with a free-spirited septuagenarian. In the film’s climax, Maude carries out a long-held plan to end her life on her 80th birthday, on her own unconventional terms. Why shouldn’t I be like Maude? 

At first, I thought my death would have to be a DIY affair. I knew that if I wasn’t going to die from an incurable illness within six months, or if I had dementia, that would disqualify me from the “medical aid in dying” options offered by a growing number of states. Though well intentioned, these programs are so mired in bureaucracy and restrictions that even patients who qualify often die while waiting for approvals.

Advocacy groups like Death With Dignity are working to streamline and expand end-of-life options across the country, but the wheels turn slowly. And if you have dementia, like my mom, or just feel like you’ve had a good run after 90 years on the planet? No soup for you!

Determining how to bring about a dignified, pain-free ending without medical help was a daunting prospect, so I began workshopping the idea — only half-joking — with friends. Would my college pal, an anesthesiologist, be willing to risk prison time to help me out? What kind of bribe money would I need to convince a veterinarian to do the deed?

Then, in the months after my mom’s death, an acquaintance recommended Amy Bloom’s “In Love: A Memoir of Love and Loss,” a heartbreaking book that chronicles the author’s journey to Zurich to witness the assisted death of her husband, who’d been diagnosed with early Alzheimer’s.