My Fathers Story

As I started to read Suzan Wolf's story I realized how close to home it is. I am actually going through the same thing with my father. He had a stroke and has very little brain activity and his body is starting to shut down. On Wednesday the doctors came to us and said he had very little chance of surviving and if he did his quality of life would basically be a vegetable. We had to make a decision as to how long we wanted to keep him on the ventilator. We know that dad has always said," He wanted to live while he was alive and die when it is time to die". The thing about this is how do you end the life of your parent, no matter how bad of shape their in?

When a doctor comes to you and tells you, there is no hope or that the person you love will be in pain for the rest of their life it really has an effect on your belief system. I started to question why God would do this again to us so soon after our mother just past. My brother and I had to sit down and actually plan when we would end our own father's life. A million and one questions came to my mind so fast that I couldn't even take the time to sort through them all. We were afraid that the rest of the family would be upset or think we just gave up on him, like Suzan in our story, "We kept vigil hoping and praying things would go different".

Friday we got the news that he is bleeding internally somewhere and he is too weak to have any kind of procedure done to correct this. There best guess is either his ulcer or his bowels are doing the bleeding, but the ultra sound is not clear. Just something else to add to everything going wrong. How much longer must this man ender the pain because we don't want to let him go?

One of the questions we have faced is how do you tell the rest of the family and friends that we plan to take him off of the ventilator on Monday and they said it will probably be within hours. Trying to contact the family and telling each of them the circumstances and our plan of action has been one of the most difficult things I have done. Each with basically the same questions and then followed with," Are you sure this is the right thing"? Of course we are not sure. We are tired, angry, confused, sad, and about fifty other emotions all wrapped into one and still have to function in our everyday life, with family, school, work and life in general. This has made me realize how important it is to be clear as to what you want done in case of any emergency situation; I don't want my family to have to make these difficult decisions.

I could only imagine how Suzan and her family must have felt hearing from himself that it is time to rest. I have never really thought much about assisted suicide but after reading this story and having my own experience, which isn't exactly the same, but similar in the sense that we both have to help carry out final wishes regarding life. I realize