AN OTHERWISE ORDINARY DAY | Amanda Le Rougetel
THE DAY
“How shall we do today?” I asked my sister.
“I don’t know,” she said.
“Let’s just keep it ordinary,” I said.
“Right,” she said.
And so we did.
Our mother would die that afternoon, sometime after five o’clock. Until then, we did what gave Mum pleasure: we drank tea, ate croissants, and did the crossword — with Mum getting clues neither my sister nor I could. At ninety-five and a half, Mum’s mind could still think things through.
At about ten minutes to five, the doorbell rang announcing the two medical professionals assigned to assist Mum in dying. Christie, a nurse educator, would insert the IV. Peter, a nurse practitioner, would give the injections.
How right it felt to welcome them both warmly into Mum’s home, where Peter had first come two weeks earlier in the role of assessor. After a calm and fulsome conversation that afternoon, he had determined that she qualified for medical assistance in dying (MAiD), a view echoed by the second assessor the next week — this one a doctor, equally kind. It was so reassuring to talk openly about life and its corollary, death. Talk grounded in compassion, not muddied by heavy sentiment or misplaced sorrow inappropriate to the details of Mum’s circumstances, her life view, or her wishes.
On the day, at about ten minutes past five, Mum answered a final question to confirm her consent, signed her name for a final time and, one last time, set herself laboriously down into her recliner.
She had been very clear about wanting both my sister and me there, with her, holding her hands. She was ready to go, but did not want to be alone as she went.
It was surreal and ordinary in equal measure.
Mum will be one of about 19,000 ninety-five to ninety-nine-year olds who died in 2024 in Canada — and one of about fifty-three who will have died that day in that age group in this country. Hers will be reported to the Government of Canada as a medically assisted death — one of about 13,000.
My mother had given me life. I helped give her dignity and peace in death.
The first injection was for relaxation. The second for sedation. The third to fully stop her heart.
I watched. I saw her fade, then pass from life to death. Her hand was still warm when I released mine from her clasp. She was no longer in that body. And I was relieved — for her (no more pain) and for me (no more worrying).
Time of death was 5:19 p.m.
Before the first injection, I had kissed her for my brother who could not be present. For him I said, "Say hi to Dad and to Max and Boris and Tigger (the family cats).”
Then Peter began his task. Mum started telling an anecdote from her childhood, though her words soon became mumbles and then disappeared into silence. It mattered not. I was focused on holding her in my memory as alive, as my loving, generous, kind mother who modelled courage and gave me confidence to be my own person.
That morning, Mum had said she was happy to never again have to struggle out of bed and into the day. She was ready. It was the right decision.
It was an otherwise ordinary day, the day on which my mother died.
BEFORE THE DAY
We lived 840 miles apart. Before I arrived at my mother’s residence three weeks earlier, I had talked to her every day on the phone, but daily phone calls did not tell me what I saw with my own eyes when I stepped into her suite: an old woman, challenged by simple daily life; struggling and coping, brave but, essentially, alone. While she had many friends, friends are not there in the middle of the night or the early morning when pain is real and hope is faint. Mum confessed to me on my fourth night with her just how lonely she had been. “It’s wonderful to have you here,” she said. My heart cracked.
My mother had been struggling with a very sore lower back she thought was just a pulled muscle but which turned out to be compression fractures at L1 and L2, causing her not just discomfort but pain enough that the daily routine of getting into and out of bed was marked by a series of grunts. My mother grunting in pain. Never before had I heard those noises from this woman known for her high pain threshold. Those grunts — involuntary and always apologized for, “So sorry for the noise, darling!” — made clear to me how much my mother was suffering, how limited had become her mobility.
In addition, Mum’s vision had deteriorated to the point that she, a lifelong reader, now clicked the ‘listen’ button to endure the robot voice reading news articles to her on her iPad. Watching TV provided little pleasure because she needed her recliner right up close to translate the flickering movements on the screen into some semblance of a story, and her hearing aids did not satisfactorily compensate for her hearing loss.
My mother’s foundational pleasures in life — reading and writing, conversation and connection — had been taken from her. “What do I have left to plan for?” she asked one day. “Only pain and managing the pain and then managing my bowels that are affected by the pain meds. It’s no good,” she pronounced. “It’s time to leave this party.”
Mum, a long-time advocate for dying with dignity, asked me to contact the MAiD team to get her request for an assisted death started. Within twenty-four hours, we heard from the team’s coordinator and had the papers to complete, sign and have witnessed.
As the MAiD assessment process unfolded over the following week, Mum and I settled into a companionable routine of me helping her with daily care. A strong and independent woman all her life, she now willingly accepted my assistance in getting dressed and brushing her hair, and she no longer apologized for asking me to fetch things for her, to make cups of tea, or to serve her meals. Things were not as they had always been, but they were as they should be now: Mum’s end was coming, indeed she was calling it to her, and she was at peace with being on the receiving end of loving care from her daughter.
“How do I tell my friends I am choosing MAiD?” asked Mum one morning.
“You could dictate an email to me and I could send it on your behalf to everyone you tell me to,” I proposed.
“Good idea,” said Mum, so she dictated a draft, we revised it together, and I sent it out. In response, local friends requested in-person visits, while long-distance friends and overseas relatives booked phone calls. Mum was fiercely committed to these conversations in order to say goodbye properly to those she loved the most — and to give those loved ones the chance to say goodbye to her. “I don’t want to be coerced out of my choice, but I also don’t want to leave any loose ends,” she told me as we were slotting people into days and times on her calendar.
So, sitting in her recliner, she told her friends and relatives one by one just what they meant to her, how she valued their friendship, how she was ready to go. “I’m old, I’ve had a good long life, but I can’t see or hear very well anymore,” she would say. “There’s nothing left for me to look forward to. I want to go; it’s time I died.”
This clarity on Mum’s part did not preclude some serious discussions about the gravity of choosing a MAiD death, and she and I had several conversations about death and dying, about living and loving.
“Do you think I am going against the laws of nature?”
“No, I don’t. I think it’s merciful and right to stop your pain and ease your way into death,” I replied.
“Do you think if I choose MAiD I will not meet your father on the other side?”
“I don’t know what lies beyond, Mum, but I do know that you deserve all things good and, surely, what lies beyond is nothing but good, so I’m confident you will see Dad on the other side,” I replied.
“Will anyone try to deny me this choice?”
“It is your choice, Mum, and in this country you have this right. No one is going to stop you,” I assured her.
Every question seemed reasonable to me. Who wouldn’t have questions and some doubt when actively choosing their death in this manner? Maybe it would be grand if life didn’t end in death, if we lived forever. But it does, and we don’t. My mother’s clarity about choosing a medically assisted death meant we had the gift of mindfulness during her final weeks, and the comfort of time to speak of every important thing.
Once the confirmation came through from the MAiD coordinator that Mum had been approved, she moved quickly to choose a date. “The sooner the better,” Mum said. “What’s the point in waiting any longer? I have nothing left to look forward to. Next Thursday or Friday,” she pronounced. In the end, we decided Friday was best, as it gave us all five full days once my sister arrived.
The MAiD coordinator confirmed the day, April 26, and the time, 5 p.m.
THE END
It is a simple statement of fact when I say I was fine with holding my mother’s hand as she died a merciful medically assisted death. I know this was the final most meaningful way in which I could be of service to my mother: to witness her dying while holding her hand, and to wish her well while wishing she didn’t have to go. That is a good way for a long life of loving and being loved to end.
Amanda Le Rougetel retired from college teaching to be a writer and community educator; she lives in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. Her focus is short-form creative non-fiction essays, 50-word stories, and 100-word micro-memoirs. She facilitates learning in community classrooms about how writing can be a tool for transformation in our lives. Personal agency and autonomy are themes that inform her teaching and show up in her writing. Her work has been published, among other places, in Brevity magazine, on Brevity blog, and in the Globe and Mail, Canada’s national newspaper.