It was a brilliant afternoon in early October when I got a heart-wrenching message from my mother about my father, who had endured three trips to the ER that week: “He is no better and has decided that he cannot go on like this.” At that moment I felt with full force what it means to have MAID available in Canada, and a surge of gratitude for those who have made it possible. Let me explain.

Nearly 94, my father had suffered increasingly poor health, acute pain, and incapacity for years. On the whole, he handled his long decline with philosophical acceptance and often with remarkable humour. But it was clear that as he lost his hearing, his mobility, control of his body, and finally even the ability to read, he longed to be released from this life. “I exist, but I am not alive,” he had begun saying wryly. A deeply spiritual man, we had often joked that he lived more in the other world than in this one. But his body was made of very tough stuff. It had survived a daredevil youth, war and POW camp, multiple car accidents, and COVID at age 90—not to mention decades of general carelessness about his health and an aversion to doctors, like many men of his generation. He took no measures to prolong his life, but life persisted in him. In the end it was holding him prisoner, and it had become an agony.

Because of MAID, family and old friends were able to travel and gather to spend my father’s last day with him, in the cozy supported living apartment that was his home for his last three years. We shared memories, tears, laughter, songs, and poetry. He savoured a scoop of ice cream; he enjoyed a cigarette. When the hour came and the doctor asked for his final consent, he gathered his energy and gave his clear and unequivocal response: Yes, I want to end my life. I am ready. He passed reclining in his favourite chair, surrounded by love, his wife and children at his side, and the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Good-Bye” on his lips. Because of MAID, I have been able to say that my father had about as good a death as could be wished for.  

Without MAID my father would have had to endure an agonizing move from his familiar, comfortable apartment to a hospital ward or long-term care facility. He would have lost what little remained of the autonomy and privacy he so fiercely defended, along with the daily company and care of his wife of 57 years. He might have died fairly quickly, but he might not have: his own father lived, incapacitated, to 103. Most likely he would have died unconscious, on a morphine drip. Very likely he would have died alone.

On the other side of this experience, I understand why many doctors who assess for and provide MAID say that it is the most meaningful work they do. The end of a life, I learned, is as intense, intimate, and vulnerable as the beginning. Several of us were in the room for both my father’s assessments for eligibility, and it was clear that the doctors who choose this work are motivated by empathy and solicitude. We were touched by the fullness of their attention, their careful questioning, their sensitivity to the family, and their deep compassion for my father’s suffering. At the end of a good life, all that is left is love. The doctors and nurses who assist with dying are enveloped in that love. Those who eased my father’s passage out of this world have a place in my heart alongside those who years ago helped with my daughter’s difficult passage into it. Their work is no less important, and just as deserving of recognition and gratitude.