My mother euthanised herself. Was it empowerment, or despair?

My elderly mother euthanised herself — it’s difficult to say “committed suicide” — alone, late last year.

Gemmell Nikki 2013 Credit Kathy Luu Horizontal

It feels like such a modern story for modern times.

My mother euthanised herself — it’s difficult to say “committed suicide” — late last year. No one really throws around that bald and loaded S word amid all the talk of “dying with dignity”. I don’t know if she fully considered the emotional depth charges her actions set off within so many lives. The fact is, my elderly mother euthanised herself, by herself, in front of the telly. Some builders — who had been taking their time renovating her bathroom, leaving her without it for weeks — found her the following morning. Everything was thought through very carefully.

My mother was in chronic pain. She’d had a foot operation 10 months earlier. I’d like to talk to the surgeon who took my mother’s carefully saved money and assured her he could “fix” her; I cannot bear to. He left her with a spine thrown out of kilter by the drastic surgery; left her too angry and despairing to talk about a further fix; left her twisted around a walking stick in her final weeks like a withered crone from a fairytale.

My beautiful mother had never been that; never, truly, “old”, or impaired. She was left sobbing over the phone to me that she dreaded going into a home; dreaded losing control of her life, becoming a burden.

He left her with an opiate addiction; a flirtation with painkillers that became a reliance which after several months began to lose their potency and then the overwhelming, debilitating pain nestled back into my mother’s world as her constant companion. She was doctor shopping, hoarding pills, and in hindsight that all felt far too easy. She was broken by the operation and facing a future of uncertainty and fear. I felt helpless.

Once, long ago, she’d been an uneducated teenager from the Hunter Valley coalfields who was photographed by the likes of Max Dupain and Laurence Le Guay. Her modelling diary carefully records the jobs for such iconic brands as David Jones, Remington, Rothmans, Farmers, Hordern Bros. Then she disappeared into the world of marriage and motherhood because that was expected of women back then, but her mind was keen, sharp, hungry; needing more. My magnificent mother fought her entire adult life for control. Independence. Empowerment. A say in her own circumstances.

So. In the end, she did it her way. She took care not to implicate any of her children — when the police officers informed me of her death they also pulled out a pad and took notes. Now I know why. I could have been the subject of a police investigation if I’d had anything to do with the situation. My mother was careful; she’d done her research. But in the fraught world of euthanasia in Australia, I just say this: if the family cannot by law be involved in the wishes of a person wanting to be euthanised, then you are condemning that person to a monstrously bleak and lonely death. One that I, as the daughter, will never recover from.

I didn’t listen enough to her; didn’t grant her the dignity of a proper audience when she spoke of her Dying with Dignity books and forums; I’d get too emotional. Perhaps, in the end, she thought it easier to go it alone without the clutter of familial complication, to take matters into her own hands secretly and with great determination.

Nothing has ever been as dramatic in my life as my mother’s leaving of it. Were her final moments an act of empowerment, or despair? A gesture of motherly love, or selfishness? A friend in her 80s gripped my fist at the funeral, tighter than it’s ever been held. “You’re now a part of the SWS,” she whispered fiercely. “What’s that?” “The Strong Women’s Society.” She spoke as if it were a highly secret organisation to which I’d suddenly been granted honorary membership. Mum was a member of that too. I have to hold on to that. To make sense of it all.

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