Simply put, assisted dying is lawful in Switzerland if the person is mentally competent to make decisions, has unselfish motives, and controls the device which administers a death drug.
“She’s the one who set up the appointment,” Jud said.
Trish told her family.
“She said, ‘I am going to do this, and I want you to support me 1,000%, or I’m going to go without you,'” Jud recalled.
A friend told Jud his mom was being selfish. Nothing, he said he soon realized, could be further from the truth. She was simply candid and honest with the people she loved most. Was her decision cowardly, his mom asked? Absolutely not, he said. He told her she had guts.
He and the rest of the Parker family told her they supported her decision − after all it was her decision .
“She made it clear this (option) wasn’t for everyone,” Jud said, adding she would have wanted him to share her story because, “she also wanted people to know this option does exist.”
Besides her three sons, Trish had five grandchildren. In the weeks before the trip to Switzerland, she took some to lunch. There was no talk of death. No mention of what was to happen. No sadness. Just a grandmother and them spending time together. And when the time came, there was to be no tear-filled funeral. Absolutely not, she insisted. She wanted an Irish wake.
Happy, fun and celebratory.
After all, death is merely part of life.
Jud was on board, but still …
“I said ‘listen, if we get there and you don’t want to pull the trigger, we can just get on a plane and come back home,” he recalled telling her.
Trish scolded Jud with a profanity-infused tongue-lashing.
This was going to happen, she told him.
End of life choices in Ohio and across the US
Decades ago, the idea of being prescribed medication to end your own life, was typically referred to as assisted suicide. Many called the notion ghoulish. Kevorkian was called “Dr. Death” in the media.
Pegasos refers to the practice as voluntary assisted dying. In the U.S., it’s commonly known as physician-assisted suicide, or more specifically these days, medical aid in dying.
“It’s about living your life with an understanding that death is a part of it,” said Lisa Vigil Schattinger, executive director of the nonprofit Ohio End of Life Options.
The group’s mission is to raise awareness about medical aid in dying and provide “fact-based education” while working with a partner political fund to convince state lawmakers to pass an assisted dying law.
Oregon was the first state to enact a so-called “Death with Dignity Law.” Voters approved it in 1994; it took effect in 1997. The law withstood an onslaught of legal challenges, all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. Since 2008, voters, lawmakers or state Supreme Court decisions have made assisted dying legal in Washington, D.C., and in the states of Washington, Vermont, Montana, California, Colorado, Hawaii, New Jersey, Maine and New Mexico.
Rules in those places are similar, Schattinger said. Patients must, for example, have less than six months to live. Medical providers − who can’t, for instance, morally reconcile the Hippocratic principle of “do no harm” − are not required to participate in assisted dying.
When told of Trish’s story, Schattinger said she respected it.
“As an adult, I have been making decisions all my life, but at the end of life, I can’t?” Schattinger asked.
However, she added Ohio End of Life Options is focused on adults who have less than six months to live, are mentally competent and can ingest assisted dying medications. Ideally, she said, Ohio would adopt a legal template used in other so-called “Death with Dignity” states.
“We want to work within that framework,” she explained.
Schattinger also is president of the board of directors for the national nonprofit Death with Dignity Center in Portland Oregon. That group considers Oregon’s assisted death law as a model to follow.
“Our mission focuses on improving how people with terminal illness die,” the center website states, in part. “We know some people die in horrible ways as their terminal illness overtakes them. In our current healthcare landscape, that is undeniable. And, it’s unacceptable.”
Reasons for suicides are complex. Many can be related to a mental illness. But there are other instances, which even local experts acknowledge, could possibly be outliers of sorts:
Last year, in Stark County, Ohio, the coroner’s office ruled at least 71 deaths suicides. The Canton Repository, part of the USA TODAY Network, found that in as many as 10 of those cases the suicide was completed by someone who was terminally ill or had been living with chronic physical pain.
They included a 75-year-old who’d complained about poor quality of life, and whose lung cancer had spread to his lymph nodes and a 59-year-old man whose blood test results prompted an urgent summons from an oncologist. Another 59-year-old man had lived with unrelenting pain for years and was largely immobile, needing both hips and knees replaced.
A 63-year-old Canton man battling a series of health problems had just received test results, a family member said. He left a $2,000 check to pay for cremation and a note which stated “physically ill, mentally spent, done, love to mother, uncle, brothers, family … “
The Stark Coroner’s Office and Stark County Mental Health & Addiction Recovery recently joined forces, in an effort to better understand and analyze suicides, which could aid in future intervention. Outside of suicide, the only way for a terminally ill person in Ohio to hasten their own death is to refuse life-prolonging treatments or to stop eating and drinking. Neither, Schattinger said, are recommended without professional guidance and support, such as hospice care.
Trish and her sons had left the U.S. for Switzerland four days before Thanksgiving. Again, “surreal” was the word Jud often used to describe much of the trip. On one hand, the three had so much fun. Still, he could almost envision “the grim reaper” reaching from behind.
When a Pegasos physician visited, Jud said the doctor told his mom that many Pegasos patients were in a wheelchair or on oxygen. A healthy Trish used neither. Maybe she wanted to wait; give it more time?
“We are doing this tomorrow,” Trish insisted.
Trish ‘nailed them all,’ as a wife, mother and artist
In 2018, then-state Sen. Joe Schiavoni, co-sponsored an assisted dying bill in Ohio but it never made it out of committee. Now a part-time judge in Mahoning County, Schiavoni said he knew the bill wouldn’t become law.
But that wasn’t the point.
“It was just trying to get the discussion to move forward … to have the conversation continue,” he said.
But even if legal, is assisted death moral?
Death with Dignity foes, much like anti-abortion advocates, would loudly shout ‘no!’ Both similarly cite arguments about sanctity of life, ethics and a spiral toward possible euthanasia.
Those same issues often are rooted in religious views −Trish was raised Catholic, but no longer practiced.
All four of the world’s major religions − Christianity, Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism −oppose physician-assisted death and euthanasia, according to “Perspectives of Major World Religions regarding Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide: A Comparative Analysis,” an article published in the December 2022 issue of the Journal of Religion and Health.
“This contrasts with a secular and atheistic worldview … ” the authors wrote.
One reason for the divergence, the authors explained, is because followers of all four religions believe in a higher being.
“This inevitably leads practitioners of these religions to seek to understand morality not from within but instead in accordance with this external arbiter,” the article stated.
Although now constrained by judicial canons, Schiavoni said as a state senator he would have argued everyone is an individual; that providing a right to assisted death does not force it upon anyone.
“That there should be a path in place,” he said.
“Yes, we do need a change,” Schattinger said.
After the physician visited Trish the day before Thanksgiving, a nurse came by hours later. He explained how she would get an IV line. And that she was the one who’d ultimately push the button to administer a lethal dose of the barbiturate Nembutal (pentobarbital sodium).
“He said, ‘You will go to sleep, but you won’t wake up,'” Jud recalled.
A few tears snuck out; he couldn’t help it.
On Thanksgiving, when Trish and her sons had arrived at Pegasos, they were invited inside. She and her sons, and five Pegasos staff members sat in a large room. They indulged in what he described as cocktail hour-style conversation for the better part of 90 minutes.
“Art, politics, travel,” Jud recalled.
But nothing about death − until finally, Trish interjected.
“OK, it’s time to do this,” she announced.
She went to the bed near a window on one side of the room.
Jud and Reed followed.
“Boys, I think you should go in the other room,” she said.
Jud said his knees buckled as he and his brother walked out.
Twenty minutes later, it was over.
Trish was dead.
Jud and his brother returned to the room to say goodbye to their mom. Reed, he said, thanked her. Jud said he was frozen. He couldn’t find the right words. He still regrets that.
He hopes she knows, though.
“She was the best mother, wife and artist; she nailed them all,” Jud said.
Contact Tim Botos at tim.botos@cantonrep.com. On X: @tbotosREP
