What do you tell your father when he's ready to die? Dignity shouldn't be illegal

In the final months of his life, my dad pleaded with his children just to let him die.

He became belligerent towards his loved ones for keeping him alive. We kept him at home on his Northern California farm for as long as possible, but eventually he moved into a nearby hospice facility in town. Within a week of arriving at hospice, he died of polio, scared and angry.

The story of 29-year-old Brittany Maynard, who moved her family from Northern California to Oregon so she could die with dignity under the state’s law, captured international attention and sparked an ongoing debate in the United States about how exactly we should be allowed to die – and when.

While millions already view Brittany’s death as tragic, to me, she is a new kind of hero.

My father suffered far more than anyone should at the end of their days. Although he battled terminal illness, the state of California would not let him choose how to die. Disease never does, but maybe the law can.

Had Dad lived just 400 miles further north, he would have had access to the same options that Brittany chose. Oregon’s 1997 Death with Dignity Act requires consultations with two doctors who confirm a person is terminal and will die within six months, certification that the persons is of sound mind, and then two verbal requests for a prescription. But then you get a lethal dose of drugs, and you can die as best as anyone really can, unafraid and at a relative peace.

Looking back at his life, it’s amazing that my father even lived to adulthood. Born into a world of turmoil and World War, he was stricken by polio in the 1950s while still a young man. After months in the Iron Lung, he survived, went to university, married and later had three children.

Dashing as a young and even sick older man who looked a bit like Johnny Carson, Dad hid his handicap well. He played a mean game of tennis and enjoyed a drink and banter with his fellow attorneys. He could drift effortlessly between Mad Man and Brawny Man; he lived his entire life on the same Central Valley farm our family has owned since the Gold Rush of 1848. In retirement, Dad spent his days with his wife outdoors on that ranch, working to rehabilitate wounded birds that the county wildlife officers would drop at their doorstep for safekeeping.

But over time, his body began to break down, and breathing became labored. The polio had come back, this time in the form of post-polio syndrome, which weakens muscles that were affected the first time around. Dad’s ailment would slowly strip him of his independence, his ability to move and, eventually, his ability to breathe. If this was death’s door, he was rapping it with what knuckles he could. His decline would last nearly a decade before his doctors gave up on treatments and assigned visits from hospice nurses.

For my father’s disease, there is no cure.

While my family was left to watch my father’s body break down before our eyes, his mind remained sharp as ever. He loved to engage his kids in lengthy discussions about politics; as an attorney, he enjoyed an informed argument and knew how to make tough decisions.

As his days devolved into a drudgery of pills, bad daytime TV, and constant reliance on a breathing machine, Dad told us he was ready to die.

“I’m done,” my father said.

But choosing to die, or even assisting someone who wants to die, is a felony in California. Our options to humanely end the suffering were limited. Self-starvation and dehydration remain the only legal ways to help someone choose when they die in the state. But few of us can muster the strength to starve to death, and caretakers – including Medicare-supported hospice nurses – are not in the business of starving people.

In a place that understands the necessity to families like mine of humane assisted dying laws, a person who is “done” can, as Maynard did, gather her family and and friends for a dignified ritual that ends with the patient self-administering the medicine of deliverance.

My hope is that the story of Brittany Maynard will ignite a movement everywhere – to change outdated, inhumane laws across the world that govern end-of-life decision-making – so that no one has to suffer as my father did.

Dignity should not be illegal.