In the End, She Stayed

I just finished listening to a fiction book, What Are You Going Through, by Sigrid Nunez (2020). It is literary fiction.

It's about a woman who stands by a friend with a terminal illness, some kind of never-identified cancer. The woman wants to commit suicide in order to have a beautiful death. Or a better death, at any rate.

She doesn't want to suffer.

I wish a good death upon everyone. You know, the kind where you fall asleep in a chair, your favorite TV show on or a book in your hand, and you just never wake up.

But we don't have those kinds of deaths. We have long lingering deaths that can take years, sometimes.

They are not fun. I watched that with my mother when she had pancreatic cancer. She never once, to my knowledge, thought of euthanasia as an out.

But I had a friend who was diagnosed with a terminal illness who did think of it.

We had a long talk about it one day over lunch, about six months after her diagnosis. She wasn't going for any long-term treatments, no organ transplants, she told me. And she wanted to go when she wanted to go.

She'd already contacted an organization in England that assisted people who were terminal and wanted to die, she said. She had the information in hand. This was how she wanted to go.

Her husband was against it, she said. But this was her plan. Someone would need to help her, she thought. She didn't know who that might be, but she hoped to convince him it was the right thing to do.

She did not ask me to help her. I did not volunteer, but I would have helped her. Even if it had meant I went to jail, I would have been there for her if that had been her wish. In the book, the narrator was there for her friend until the end. The author portrayed an evocative and eloquent rendering of friendship and what, if anything, we owe to one another.

My friend and I never discussed this subject again, and as her life dwindled down from a five-year span to months, I realized that she wasn't going to go through with it.

She was going to go the way she had said she didn't want to go, with hospice hovering about, and her loved ones telling her goodbye, her body growing thinner and weaker. One day she wrote me that the only way she could communicate with me was via text. Emails were too hard to write. She couldn't talk on the phone. 

She would die in her own home when life finally left her.

But it would not be by her own hand.

I was surprised, really, that she didn't go through with her initial plan. She was always so forthright, so quick to do what she wanted, and her control of herself and her thoughts were almost superhuman. 

This book brought all of that back to me, how my friend and I had discussed this in depth, in earnest. How I had thought until the last months of her life that she would, at some point, die by her own hand.

The will to live is a strong pull, stronger even, than the will to die a beautiful death. I remember watching my mother's fight to live. My friend's fight to live was no less devastating, but not quite so tortuous to me because she was, after all, a friend I loved, not my mother.

The book portrayed the narrator not as a hero, but as a kind, reflective woman who wanted what was best for her friend. But she also found the whole situation disturbing, and at the end, she wondered, what exactly is the meaning of life?

I see this valiant will to live in the longevity of many folks around me, people who are still going strong in their 90s. What have they found to live for, I wonder? What keeps them going? The desire to see great grandchildren? The need to prove something?

What, actually, keeps me going? Love for my husband? My need to take care of him, to see to him, and ensure that he's happy, or at least as happy as he can be? 

I'm not really sure I know. Does anyone really know what they are living for, until those words from the doctor tell them their time is nearly gone?