Killing

“I could just kill him!” We’ve all said it. but have we ever really meant it? Have we ever seriously considered ending another person’s life? Cause I have. On October 24th, 2017, my Grampa was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. The doctor told us we could submit the results to the BC Cancer Centre and try for some chemo or radiation. My mom, my grandpa, and I shared a momentary glance and all knew immediately that we wouldn’t be doing that. We knew in that moment that this was it. It wasn’t a shock: he was 89. And it didn’t feel like a momentous shift. It was just… there. The simple, undeniable fact of his imminent death. My grandmother, on the other hand, spent the whole drive home talking about the decision she thought we all needed to make. And she kept bringing it up, until eventually my mom said to her a few days later over dinner, perhaps not as kindly as she could have, “there won’t be any treatment.” She never brought it up again. 

Before the drugs took away his lucidity entirely, we all tried to find what closure we could. I made sure he knew I was planning to propose to my now wife. Not many nights later, my Mom stood next to him, held his hand, and quietly told him how grateful she was that he’d always taken care of her. As tears streamed silently down all our faces, she forcefully assured him that he had done well, and that he was done, whenever he wanted to be. He was always a stubborn old Scot. We should have known he wouldn’t listen to her. That was the first night I cried myself to sleep, and the first time I understood that grief is not one long event. It’s a repeated trauma, hammering you again and again as you lose someone over and over, sometimes in surprising ways, more times than you would ever think you could survive.

In our desire to keep him out of Hospice, to let his die at home in his own bed, we sliced the day into shifts: my Grandma taking the morning and afternoon, my Mom the evening, and me the long nights. I was working from home at their kitchen table while watching him sleep (or, more often, not sleep) in his armchair in the living room.  So after maybe a week and a half of sleep-deprivation and having my heart cut to pieces by the daily sight of my Grampa reduced to rubble, refusing to die, a day arrived when we thought it was finally happening. It was Sunday. I was woken by my Mom about 6am after only an hour and a half of sleep. I stumbled down the stairs, where my Grandpa was lying in bed. The three of us all stayed with him – my mom sitting on the side of the bed holding one hand, me sitting on the floor holding the other, and my grandma alternating between sitting on the foot of the bed, and pacing. Each one of his breaths was laboured, rasping. And there was such long stillnesses between them that after every one, I could hear all three of us thinking, “this is it. Finally.” But then another breath would come. Just as hard, just as grating, just as obviously on the verge of death. And another. Another. Another. 6am became 7, became 10, became 1 in the afternoon. My mom went to find us all some food, but I was with him for 5 straight hours. Thinking after every single breath that he’d gone. About 3 breaths every 10 seconds. Five thousand four hundred breaths. Five thousand four hundred times in a row I thought “He’s gone.” And five thousand four hundred times in a row, he wasn’t. Those hours broke something inside me, something I’m sure will never be whole again. I started pleading with him, often angrily. “You don’t need to stay here for us. Please go. Please please, just GO.” And during all the waiting, and thinking it was over, while I was with him alone, that’s when I first had the thought: I could end it. I could take one of these pillows and hold it over his face, and that would be it. He probably wouldn’t even wake up, or have any idea. He would just be gone. “At peace,” as they say, despite the violence of the act I was imagining. I didn’t do it. Eventually I went back upstairs to get some sleep. By the time I woke up, he was back in his armchair. Confused and belligerent and very much alive. We went back to our routine. But every night, when we finally managed to get him to sleep through whatever combination of morphine, then-illegal cannabis oil, and good old fashioned persuasion managed to work that particular evening, the thought would occur to me. 

I remember one night in particular, my grandpa was fast asleep, I was working away at their kitchen table, and I had to sprint out of the room because I was suddenly overwhelmed with such an enormous wave of grief – grief not for his coming death, but for his continued life. I was curled in a ball at the bottom of the stairs, weeping as quietly as I could and begging, literally begging God to just let him die. And once the frustration passed, I would think to myself again “just do it. Go get a pillow and just put him out of his goddamn misery.” Or sometimes it would be “Surely if I gave him all that morphine at once, his body wouldn’t be able to handle it.” That one worried me because it might be detectable: he was planning to donate his body to the UBC Medical School, so I thought they might at some point dissect him and see the damage caused by my inept poisoning and immediately know what had happened. But there was never any moral quandry about it for me. I knew in the deepest place in my heart, and still do, that killing him would be the right thing. Before long, I started planning it in advance. “If he hasn’t died by tonight, I’m going to do it.” Then another day would pass, and another night would pass, and I hadn’t done it. 

Eventually, he reached a point where we had to admit he needed professional care. Knowing that would take away any opportunity I had, but not wanting to admit the real reason for my opposition, I put up some struggle. I felt like if we didn’t let him die at home, that we would be failing him. My determination increased. If I was going to do it, my last chance was approaching. My Mom made the call to hospice, we were informed he would have a place the next day. And then, that night, for the last time, I didn’t do it. 

He died on December 6th. I was at the office, just about to leave work, when I got a call from my Mom. “He’s gone.” That moment was nothing like I could have predicted. I was sad, I felt the shock of knowing he was no longer in the world. I was relieved that it for over, for him and for us. But also, I was finally able to let go of feeling like I’d failed him by not making use of that pillow.