Love is as Strong as Death

The Burden of Love, Death, Sin, and Suicide

For two years I drove my dad the 100 miles from our house to Payson for his primary care doctor’s appointments. It wasn’t so much about the doctor as it was going up two hours early so we could have breakfast at the Knotty Pine Cafe or the Airport Cafe for lunch and chat with the cooks and wait staff he knew for almost three decades. When his doctor retired I convinced him to use our primary care who was a block away from our house.

He let me sit in on their doctors’ appointments because my sister insisted we needed a second ear on what the doctors actually said, not what my Dad thought he heard or deliberately concealed from us. She would often “attend” the appointments via speaker on my cell phone. She knew the questions to ask and, because she had been a nurse for 25 years, Dad would listen to her if she supported the doctor’s prescriptions he didn’t like.

The doctor scrolled through his new patient screening questions.

Loss of appetite? Nope. Heart problems? Yes. Kidney problems? Yes. Lung problems? Yes. Joint pain? Nope. Vision problems? Yes.

At 86 with congestive heart failure, kidney problems, gout, and COPD the “Yes’s” outnumbered the “Nope’s” three to one.

“Have you experienced any depression?”

A pause.

“If you lost everything and you had to live with your kids, and your wife was dying and you couldn’t take care of her, don’t you think you’d be depressed? Yes.”

Yes?

Dad always defaulted to his “jolly good old boy persona” whenever he was in public. At home he was quickly angered and frustrated. He sat in front of his TV for hours and slept for hours a day.

With all my background in psych and degrees, I probably should have recognized the signs of depression. But he wasn’t a client he was my dad, and we were too enmeshed in our “father/son” issues exacerbated by our role change and living together reluctantly out of necessity, duty, and obligation to my mom, and yes, love, but under stressful conditions that we all knew were only going to get worse. It was impossible to see his anger, his insulting my wife’s housekeeping or throwing a tantrum because I couldn’t take him to Walmart RIGHT NOW as a symptom of anything other than him being a self-centered asshole.

Yes. I knew then that I saw it but I couldn’t know it. Now I knew it and couldn’t un-see it. He didn’t know how to “be depressed”, I think. He certainly wasn’t a “mopey Eeyore, fish for my misery” depressed. He was never one to publicly show any sadness, worry, existential pain, grief or sorrow. He suffered very privately. The only emotion that came to the surface was anger. It was seldom really about what he was angry about.

Of course I did what everyone does when faced with a new world changing realization: I Googled “elderly depression”. The findings were grim, but not surprising. An article in Psychology Today sums up dozens of articles:

“Statistics from the National Council on Aging state that those 85 years and older have the highest suicide rate of any age group. It is over four times higher than the nation’s overall rate of suicide. As with most age groups, the majority of elders who kill themselves are male. As high as those figures are, the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy (AAMFT) suggests that the rates for elder suicide are under-reported by 40 percent or more due to what they refer to as “silent suicides.” These would include overdoses, self-imposed starvation, and dehydration, as well as accidents. The rate of suicide completion in this age group is also high due to the lethality of methods used.”

The other thread of articles in the search were about “murder/suicide” in the elderly, especially when one spouse is terminally ill, or both spouses are anticipating becoming incapacitated and having to go into nursing homes or be taken care of by relatives. ABC News published an op-ed piece focused on the idea that a “murder/suicide” is increasingly regarded as a reasonable act done out of love or compassion.

“…an elderly couple in their 80s from Sedona, Ariz., were found dead in a Colorado cabin after the man shot his wife in the temple, then killed himself. The couple were members of Final Exit, the nonprofit group that promotes a "dignified death."

Their note to loved ones read: "Many years ago we decided to be in charge of the timing of our own death. Hopefully it would be when the lines of normal aging, health problems and finances all crossed. It is our intention to avoid the indignities of prolonged nursing home care or terminal hospitalization."

The research also showed that the majority of murder/suicides were done with guns, by the husband.

Though my dad owned a small arsenal of rifles and handguns, I knew one of his neighbors, a good friend who was in ill health, had shot himself. His son found him a couple days later when he didn’t answer his phone. My dad said that was a shitty thing to do to your kid. Regardless, one day when my dad was out shopping I took his loaded shotgun out of his bedroom closet and hid it on our side of the house. If he missed it, he never said anything.

But… I also clicked on the links to Assisted Suicide, Final Exit, Medically Assisted Suicide, Active and Passive Euthanasia, Sanctity of Life, and Bio-Ethics. Anecdotes of the horrors of terminal illness, of desperation, of abandonment, of sacrificial care giving, of last breath reconciliations, of faith and hope, they all “made sense”. I was no longer just a conceptual voyeur of other people’s anecdotal pain, faith or desperation, I was living in and with “a story”.

As I read and researched, I saw that there were some legitimate shades of gray, even within Christian critiques of medical technology that has out distanced concepts of bio-ethics.

Then it became personal. And the grays got broader.

Two years ago I was diagnosed with stage three rectal cancer. It was still in a treatable stage. When we left the oncologist’s office my wife said, “What are you going to do?”

I had developed tremors in my hands over the past couple years. I told her, “I need to get a neurological exam done before I make a decision.” We had taken care of her father for six years as he slowly died of a Parkinson’s-like neurological disorder.

“I’m not going to put you through caring for my parents only to have you have to care of me.” She nodded. She knew.

If necessary, I would choose my own passive euthanasia: Suicide by certain fatal, relatively quick cancer rather than be a long term burden on my family.

As much as they loved me, I also loved them.

NEXT: I will begin a series of posts “thinking out loud” on the nuances of the sanctity of life, the sanctity of love, the sanctity of death, and the nuances of the various levels and types and laws regarding assisted suicide, euthanasia, and the inconsistencies in the Church’s views of suicide, death, and martyrdom.