Oliver Brody remembers his partner, Maggie Lake

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. ​

The process for getting the drugs worked just as the law prescribes: she met with two doctors, who interviewed her, asked her questions, informed her of alternative palliative care that was available, and she made the request for the drugs.  Two weeks later, she met again with her doctors, and made the second request for the drugs.  And 48 hours after that, the prescription was written, and she picked it up.  There was a pharmacy in town that stocked the drugs that were prescribed, and she had the prescription filled.  
 
Although she still didn't know whether she would end up taking the drugs, she was very much relieved to have them in her possession.
 
Maggie was an artist, and also a family nurse practitioner.  She was well-known in the community, had treated hundreds, if not thousands, of people, multiple generations of families, that came to her practice at the Putney Medical Office, and also at the Brattleboro Free Clinic.  And in that role, she came face-to-face with many of the life-and-death issues people must deal with.  She was a caring and loving health provider, and spent much more time with her patients than people are used to. She would talk with her patients, hear their stories, and try to get to the bottom of what was troubling them.  Really, she was as much a therapist or counselor as she was a medical care provider.  
 
Maggie understood how people sometimes faced problems in their lives, problems that might drive some to consider suicide.  She had had a number of patients who did commit suicide.  She called suicide "a permanent solution to a temporary problem." Maggie loved life.  She embraced life.  She was not contemplating suicide as a solution to a temporary problem.  She was ensuring that she would have the means to shorten the time she would have to suffer the pain and debilitation caused by the disease. 
 
The way Maggie chose to end her life is not the way many people, or even most people, would choose.  But it was her choice.  There are some who believe that  that choice should not be permitted, in the mistaken belief that it has some implication for how others should choose to die, that it somehow means that someone with a disability should choose this way to die.  But Maggie's choice was 
hers alone, and it has no meaning or implication other than that, for anyone else.
 
Act 39 is not perfect.  There are far too few doctors willing to prescribe the drugs, and too few pharmacies that stock those drugs, that would hasten death for a person who has just a short time to live.  
 
I am sharing this story in the hopes that people will come to understand that this is not enabling "assisted suicide," but rather giving people who are facing death a choice in how their lives can end, not suffering unremitting pain, but peacefully, and with dignity.  ​