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The leftover morphine was returned

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By Times staff | Saturday, March 22, 2008 10:47 PM CDT | () comments

It was a paralyzing thought. When a very close friend was dying from cancer several years ago, she talked briefly about hurrying things along. After a final visit with her doctors, who assured her there was no hope of surviving the disease, she talked about using the hospice-supplied morphine to hasten nature’s course.

I was terrified that she would ask me to help her abbreviate the ending.

When her life briefly lingered to the point of seeming cruel, she’d lost the strength to intervene in her own demise. But those days passed and so did my friend.

On the long drives home after sitting with her, I thought about what I would do if things were different. What if she’d been writhing in pain? Would holding her hand have been enough then? Would I have had the courage — if that’s what it should be called — to administer a lethal dose?

The very thought of it shook me to the core. I don’t recall any time before or any time since when I have felt so uncertain of something. I was not equipped for a situation that was too urgent to accommodate hesitation.

Thank God I never had to decide. In the end, my friend decided that her death should not be rushed. She found purpose in it.

A few of us were there to help with the discomforts of dying, rubbing lotion on her arms, largely for the human touch of it. We kept little droplets of water on her lips to keep them from getting too dry. We spoke to her softly and laughed when we could.

But what if there had been no laughing? What if my friend’s dying had been painful and messy and filled with despair? The fact of the matter was that she was leaving us. What did it matter if someone stepped on the gas a little? Whom would it hurt?

It makes no sense to dwell there. She survived the dying.

But I’m thinking about it again now because I’ve been following the story of the French woman, Chantel Sebire, who petitioned her country’s courts for the right to an assisted suicide. She was horribly disfigured by cancerous tumors in her face, and there was no hope for her survival.

There was no pain medication to relieve her. She wanted to be done, and her wish came true late Wednesday — only after her plight had divided her country on the question of euthanasia.

Oddly, I am just as disturbed by the division over this woman’s right to die as I was by the fear of being asked to be the one doing the assisting.

I’m not trying to be funny when I say that a recent bout with the flu taught me something about my tolerance level for pain and discomfort.

If I knew my life was ending, and the process of it was going to be painful beyond imagination, I’d likely choose to take a pass. There are worse things than pain, yes. But, when life loses all quality and turns to burden, the instinct to survive loses its strength.

I was horrified by the prospect of helping my friend die, partly because I loved her so, and partly because I wasn’t sure whether it was right.

Barb Ickes can be contacted at (563) 383-2316 or bickes@qctimes.com.