¶ … father's death and her father requesting that treatment be accorded him so that he speedily is delivered from his pain, Ms. Wolf is faced with the dilemma of whether or not to accede. Always a staunch opponent of any euthanasia-assisted program, she realized that the choice was not so simple and that sometimes suicide or euthanasia exists in the gray zone.
Ultimately, nature, as she puts it, helped her out and her father lingered on long enough to enjoy his last remaining moments with her and die comfortably and at peace.
In those last few hours, she sang to him, reminisced about his time with her, they shared loving and tender recollections (he moved his jaw three times inferring that he loved her); the father had a chance to see his other loved ones and his death was more of a closure. More so, during that period of time, he for the first time articulated questions that niggled at him regarding his death and, with the hospital unwilling and unable to impart the data that her father so clearly needed, he was helped in meeting his last moments by people over her cellular phone including her rabbi and others.
Ms. Wolf acknowledged that her father had to die. She therefore tried hard to control her feelings so that the pain of her 'soul' not hold him back in any way can compel him to linger on this earth. On the other hand, she tried to be with him and see to his needs in the best way that she could -- short of hastening his death in any physical way. During that time, he seemed to have received...
Ms. Wolf, herself, seems to have felt comforted with the way he died, but given his particular experience, for the first time she realized that the euthanasia dilemma is not so simple; that situations vary, and that, some times, euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide ore even suicide itself may be a plausible choice.
As Ms. Wolf points out, the issue is not so simple. The father's situation was also compromised by incidents that may have lessened his inclination for euthanasia. Oftentimes -- and this usually occurs to people from less privileged means -- the hospital or medical-institution itself produces the desire for euthanasia with its callous, heartless, fumbling modes of treatment. Some of this cold reaction was seen in the hospital's protocol to Wolf, which, even thoguh he could afford better treatment, was still mistreated in certain ways. Mistreatment may have come about due to the hospital perceiving him as someone who was elderly, dying, and could no longer be helped and therefore a drain on their system. Such attitudes, particularly in the American medical system, are unfortunately commonplace. Many instances of patient desiring suicide may, therefore, be prevented were other situations addressed, such as were better and more empathic medical care accorded to the patient in the first case so that he or she would never desire cessation form life.
In the same way, empathetic hospice and palliative…
