Hello Invisible Audience,
It’s been a really long time. I want to apologize, but I won’t. I haven’t had the energy to write, and that’s all there is to it. However, in the last month or so I’m finally feeling a lot better and different than I have been, so I wanted to write.
And why tiptoe in? Why not dive?
Today I want to talk about death.
Recently, a friend recommended a book to me that I can’t stop thinking about: The Brilliant Life of Eudora Honeysett. It is an amazing book, about a woman in her 80s who spent most of her life taking care of her mother, never married, and has decided she is going to go to Switzerland to a clinic that helps people who want to die.
She starts the application process, and is simultaneously swept up in friendships with two of her neighbors—one a young girl who recently moved in next door with her family—after spending many years mostly alone. The book is beautifully written. It flashes back to some very hard things she went through in her life that have shaped her into the cantankerous, judgmental woman she has become.
Yet throughout the book—there are some spoilers here, so if you want to read it, you might go do that first—her hard exterior is slowly chipped away by these friendships and she slowly becomes a lot more of a caring, feeling human than she appeared at first.
Nevertheless, she’s decided she will be less of a bother if she goes ahead with the assisted death, so she lies and tells these people who care about her that she’s going on a trip. Her friend Stanley takes her to the airport, and as they sit and have a final coffee, he finally gets her to tell him why she’s going to Switzerland.
He says a lot to her, but one word in the dialogue stood out to me, Invisible Audience.
Coward.
He called her a coward for leaving. For not trusting that her friends would want to be there for her in her last moments—that they wouldn’t take care of her.
Since I’ve already spoiled some of the main points of the book, I’m going to spoil the ending: she stays, and dies at home, with her friends around her.
There’s a reason this book hit home for me, Invisible Audience. It’s because I have thought about doing the same thing when I am old.
A big difference between Eudora Honeysett and I is that she lives in the UK, where they have a lot more social services available for a lot less—or zero—money. I do not live in the UK. I have a friend in assisted living nearby who is paying $5000 a month to basically live in a motel room that offers three meals a day and will come to her aid if she falls or needs help; where she can stay until she dies. She chose this place after her husband died, knowing full well that she has dementia, because she didn’t want to burden her son by living with him on a property that would be hard for her to get around on because it’s rocky and uneven and she uses a cane, to say nothing of how hard things will be when her dementia gets worse.
She has a choice I do not have, Invisible Audience, because if assisted living is $5000 a month now, there is no way I will be able to afford it when I am her age in 40 years. And I don’t have the choice of whether or not to live with a child.
I spent nearly all my savings and went into significant debt trying to heal from Lyme Disease. In hindsight, most of that money was wasted, but there was no way to know that until I tried every possible thing to get better—when the system is so broken that paying for help was the only way I could find any, let alone get someone to even consider Lyme Disease as a possible reason for my huge array of symptoms. And thankfully I’ve recently found some things that have given me back my working memory and executive function, but only after spending about a year terrified that I had early-onset dementia myself. Dementia, more than physical deterioration, scares the ever-loving shit out of me: how will I advocate for myself if I can’t remember who or where I am?
To be honest, the whole reason I’m looking at going back to school in the fall is to try and create some financial stability in the second half of my life that I haven’t found in the first half. But after looking at the debt I’ve accumulated and savings I’ve spent trying to get better, I am still not looking at spending retirement in style somewhere. And after all the health problems I’ve had already, it feels foolish to assume I will be in good enough health to take care of myself as I grow old.
Does it seem so strange that I am relieved there is a way to choose my own death, knowing all those factors? That, if I get a dementia diagnosis and they have yet to find a cure, I have an option that will give me the peace of mind of knowing I will not be stuck in a terrible facility with sub-par care because it’s for people who can’t afford to be anywhere else?
Does that make me a coward, Invisible Audience, or simply a realist?
The average life expectancy of someone in the U.S. is about 78 years, so I’m over halfway there. Sure, there’s a lot that can change in that time. But can you blame me, in the current political climate, where social services are being slashed, for wondering what will happen to me when I’m too old and potentially ill to take care of myself?
I am not going to make platitudes now to make you feel better, Invisible Audience. As a single woman with no kids, I think about this a lot. It has felt like a secret I’ve kept to myself—my fear, and shame that I haven’t been able to create more financial security for myself already. But I can’t be the only one thinking about this. I am certainly not the only one that our policies affect. And if it’s cowardly to consider traipsing off to a foreign country to end my life on my own terms, it is also cowardly to pretend it is not something I consider to be a better option than many I have available to me.
Love and somewhat cowardly kisses,
Morgan
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