Who Gets to Declare the “Deathbed?”

Patient’s right to life overruled in the best interest of …?

On June 20th, I posted about my friend’s agonizing dilemma as to her mother’s deathbed request.

A week thereafter, June 27, 2023, was the 20th anniversary of my father’s death, consequential to a collaborative act of “passive euthanasia.”

The soft-spoken term is doubly euphemistic.

One: My father did not request that treatment be withheld. Given that he’d declined to address the subject via a “living will” (despite having been subject to pressure by my mother), by default his wish for treatment is assumed.

Two: Regardless, this was not a case involving “extreme measures” to prolong a painful life. My father was not terminally ill; he had pneumonia, easily curable by a standard course of antibiotics.

The upshot was that my father had mid-stage Alzheimer’s; my mother and his doctor concurred that his was a life not worth living.

I was not consulted. I hadn’t even been informed that he was sick.

I found out when I called my sister on June 26th, 2003, to wish her a happy 20th wedding anniversary. She said it was not an occasion for celebration given that our father was expected to be dead by morning.

Indeed, he was. Died just as the day was dawning.

I wrote the piece below shortly after my father entered the nursing home, in which he died two years thereafter.