So today I want to talk about end of life. Some of you might know that a while ago I did a training to become an end of life doula. I helped a few people make decisions in the last chapter of their lives. Today I want to talk about one of many lessons I learned from someone I’m trying to help. We recently had a very long discussion and I learned a few things I’d like to share with you.
This person decided to end their life in Switzerland at a place called Dignitas. It’s a place that you can legally go and physicians are allowed to end someone’s life. There are lots of terms, forms, conditions, somebody has to be terminally ill, etc. A little while ago, this person I’m helping received the date on which they would give him the medication. I asked him how it was to get the letter with the date—there’s something very concrete about that—and how his well-being has been before and after receiving the date. He told me two things: one I think is interesting and one is fascinating.
The first one, interesting, he said how much relief there was to get the letter. He wasn’t dreading it. He was waiting for it. The moment he got it, he was hoping for it. He filled out all the paperwork and so on. And he said how much relief was in that. I think that’s interesting.
What’s the fascinating part? The fascinating part is when I asked him about his quality of life. How was his day to day since? And he said it has been dramatically better than before. He said that before, he was paying a lot of attention to his body parts that were not working. Getting up off of a chair, the pain here, the pain there—difficulty in all kinds of things. He’s had cancer for a while and there are lots of systems that don’t work as well. He said that before he got the letter and before he had a date, most of his attention was directed at the things that were not working. If he was trying to get out of a chair, for example, the things that were not working took his attention.
He said that after he got the letter, he stopped paying attention to the negative things and started paying attention only to the positive things. He said the signals of the illness (things that were getting worse, things were not working well), he knows will be taken care of in three weeks and he can focus on the positive things. He said it was a shift in attention.
It reminded me of research by Lara Carstensen, who showed that young people focus on the negative and the positive, but often more on the negative. As people get older, we start focusing less on the negative and more on the positive. This is why young people think they must be really miserable. They’re not. They’re focusing more on the positive. She attributed it to the idea that there’s lots to learn from negative things. And when you’re young, you should focus on the negative things. But as you get older, there are still a lot of things to learn from negative things, you just have less time to use it, so why not focus on the positive things?
In my friend’s situation, it is an extreme. Negative things in life give us information, signals, what to avoid, and what to worry about. But the moment he knows the date that thing becomes less important, and suddenly he has room to only think of the positive. He said he’s expecting a fantastic three weeks ahead, focusing only on the positive things.
I hope you find this both sad, as I do, but also important and fascinating. I’m both heartbroken about him and also relieved for him that his suffering will end soon.
It’s a complex emotion.
Bye for now.
