Taylor - Dying: a memoir

Acknowledgments

This book would not have happened without Penny Hueston, my editor at Text, who gaveme the idea and cheered me along throughout. For all their love and kindness alongthe way Id like to thank Yuriko Nagata, Terry Martin, Alfreda Stadlin, Peter Dodd,Kaoru Kikuchi and John Slee. To Barbara Masel, who for so many years has been myfirst reader, my friend, my adviser, I owe too much to ever express or repay.

Im also deeply indebted to the nurses and staff at Karuna, who have provided mewith the peace of mind to work on this project despite my failing health. I couldnot have wished for more compassionate care and counselling over these past months.And my thanks to the late Susan Addison.

And of course I thank Shin, for everything he is and does.

About two years ago I bought a euthanasia drug online from China. You can get itthat way, or you can travel to Mexico or Peru and buy it over the counter from avet. Apparently you just say you need to put down a sick horse and theyll sell youas much as you want. Then you either drink it in your Lima hotel room, and let yourfamily deal with the details of shipping your remains home, or you smuggle it backin your luggage for later use. I wasnt intending to use mine straightaway, and Iwasnt fit to travel all the way to South America, so I chose the China option.

My Chinese drug comes in powdered form. I keep it in a vacuum-sealed bag in a safeand secret place, along with a suicide note. I wrote the note over a year ago, afew days before I was due to have brain surgery. I had melanoma in the part of mybrain that controls the movement of my limbs on the right sideincurable, no guaranteethat the cancer wouldnt return after the surgery. By then I had deposits of melanomaelsewhere too, in my right lung, under the skin on my right arm, a big one just belowmy liver, another pressing on my urethra, which had necessitated the insertion in2011 of a plastic stent to keep my right kidney functioning.

I had been first diagnosed in 2005, just before my fiftieth birthday, after a biopsyon a mole excised from the back of my right knee came back positive as a stage-fourmelanoma. Since then the progress of my disease had been mercifully slow. It wasthree years before it showed up in my pelvic lymph nodes and another couple of yearsbefore it began to spread to other parts of my body. I had two rounds of surgery,from which I recovered well, and in between I suffered no debilitating symptoms.In that time I managed to keep my illness a secret from all but my closest friends.Only my husband, Shin, knew the whole story, because hed accompanied me to my regularscans and specialist appointments. But I had kept the details from our two teenagesons, trying, I suppose, to protect them from pain, because that was my job as theirmother. Then, in late December 2014, a seizure left me temporarily helpless as ababy and I could no longer deny the obvious.

So we convened a family meeting in our home in inner-city BrisbaneShin, our youngerson Dan, his girlfriend Linda, our older son Nat and his wife Asako, who droppedeverything and flew home from Kyoto where theyd been living for two years. Overthe next few days, I took them through all the paperwork theyd need to access ifthe worst happened: my will, their Powers of Attorney, my bank accounts, tax, superannuation.It helped me to feel that I was putting my house in order, and I think it helpedthem because it made them feel useful. I even revealed my interest in euthanasiadrugs and evasively said they were on my wish list for Christmas. I called it myMarilyn Monroe gift pack.

If it was good enough for her, its good enough for me, I said. Even if I neveruse it, just knowing its there would give me a sense of control.

And, to the extent that they didnt object, I think they understood.

My suicide note was by way of an apology. Im sorry, I wrote. Please forgive me,but if I wake up from the surgery badly impaired, unable to walk, entirely dependenton other people to care for me, Id prefer to end my own life. I also repeated whatId told them a hundred times to their faces: how much I loved them all, and howmuch joy they had brought me. Thank you, I told them. Talk to me when Im gone, andIll be listening. I wasnt sure that was true, but it was as metaphysical as I wasever going to get, and it did make a kind of sense at the time, given that I wasalready writing to the living from the point of view of the dead.

As it happened, I came through the surgery, not entirely unimpaired, but not toobadly off. The tumour in my brain was successfully removed. My right foot will neverfully recover its strength, so I limp, but I have normal movement in the rest ofmy right side. And, over a year after the operation, Im still here. Nevertheless,my situation remains dire. There is no cure for melanoma. A few drugs are being trialled,with varying results. Ive been involved in three drug trials, and I cant say forcertain whether any of them slowed the disease. All I do know is that, despite myoncologists best efforts, I eventually ran out of treatment options. It was thenthat I became certain I was coming to the end. I didnt know when, or exactly how,I was going to die, but I knew I wasnt going to make it much beyond my sixtiethbirthday.

With my health deteriorating steadily, I started to focus on the question of suicidelike never before. After all, in a first for me, Id gone to the extent of breakingthe law and risking prosecution, in order to obtain the means. My stash calls tome day and night, like an illicit lover. Let me take you away from all this, it whispers.My drug would go straight to the sleep centre of the brain in the time it takes tofinish a sentence. What could be easier than to swallow a fatal dose and never wakeup again? Surely that would be preferable to the alternative, which is a lingeringand gruesome demise?

And yet I hesitate, because what appears to be a clear-cut solution is anything but.Firstly, there are the practicalities of my taking such a course of action. As thelaw stands in Australia, I would have to take my drug alone, so as not to implicateanyone else in my death. Even though suicide is not a crime, assisting a person tosuicide is illegal and is punishable by a lengthy jail term. Secondly, there arethe emotional repercussions for others should I do the deed, be it in a hotel roomsomewhere, or on a lonely bush track. I ask myself if I have the right to traumatisesome hotel cleaner, or some bushwalker, unfortunate enough to discover my corpse.Of paramount concern to me are the repercussions for Shin and the boys of my takingmy own life, for as much as Ive tried to prepare them for the possibility that Imight, I know the reality would shake them to the core. It worries me, for instance,that my death certificate would read suicide as cause of death, with everythingthat the term implies these days: mental angst, hopelessness, weakness, the lingeringwhiff of criminalitya far cry from, say, the Japanese tradition of seppuku, or suicidefor honours sake. The fact that cancer was actually my killer would be lost to posterity,as would the fact that I am not, by any fair measure, mad.

Faced with all of these obstacles, I contemplate my bleak future with as much courageas I can muster. Im lucky to have found an excellent palliative care specialistand an exceptional home nursing service, so, along with my family and friends, Ihave as much support as I could wish for. If I were, however, to express a wish toend my own life, none of that support would be legally available to me. I would bestrictly on my own. Our laws, unlike those in countries such as Belgium and the Netherlands,continue to prohibit any form of assisted dying for people in my situation. It occursto me to ask why. I wonder, for instance, if our laws reflect some deep aversionamongst medical professionals here towards the idea of relinquishing control ofthe dying process into the hands of the patient. I wonder if this aversion mightstem from a more general belief in the medical profession that death representsa form of failure. And I wonder if this belief hasnt seeped out into the wider worldin the form of an aversion to the subject of death