|
By Leslie Zucker, May, 2024 Maria was our motivation, community was our foundation and Spirit was our guide. Together we created our own experiential, immersive, spiritual death doula training. 
0 Comments
To mark the ten year anniversary of Act 39, the End-of-Life Choice legislation in Vermont, Patient Choices Vermont began collecting your stories about experiences utilizing the law. This is the first example and we hope to include a story from you. by Terri Hallenbeck, originally published June 4, 2015 in Seven Days
A South Burlington woman this week ended her life by using the state law that allows terminally ill patients to hasten their own deaths by seeking a lethal dose of medication. Kimiko Yumoto, 60, the wife of Burlington Free Press reader engagement editor Aki Soga, died Tuesday, according to her obituary in the Free Press. On January 17, 2015, Maggie Lake became the third person in Vermont to make the choice to end her life by taking a combination of drugs, prescribed by her physician under the conditions laid out by Act 39. After being diagnosed with mantle cell lymphoma in 2006, over the course of 9 years Maggie had numerous rounds of chemotherapy, radiation therapy, and two stem cell transplants. (continued below)
As her disease progressed, Maggie understood that it would soon take her life. She was very anxious to obtain the drugs that could foreshorten her suffering, if she decided she would need to. She didn't know whether she would take them, but she knew she wanted to have them available if she decided she needed to. “Just put me in a cottage by a lake,” my mother Ruth used to say in her lucid moments.
That was in the years when her cognitive abilities were declining due to Alzheimer’s. Ruth had worked hard to create the strongest possible advance directives before her dementia would make that impossible. She was adamant that she did not want to live beyond her memory. But in conversations she initiated on how she wanted to end her life, my mom (who loved food) eventually just said, “Well, I think I’ll just stop eating, when I’m ready.” |
Your donation
|
RSS Feed