In his book Before We Say Goodbye, Sean Davison details the agonising death of his mother, Dr Pat Davison, from terminal cancer and starvation - according to her own living will. In an open letter to the author, Lynley Hood takes up some of the issues raised.
Dear Sean: I have read your book.
I have weighed your call for the legalisation of physician-assisted suicide against my own experiences.
Like you, I am a scientist.
But this is not about science.
No dispassionate analysis of the evidence can solve this problem.
We also have a common interest in the Innocence Project.
Do you know the legal truism "hard cases make bad law"?
It must be as obvious to you in South Africa as it is to me in New Zealand that difficult cases obscure the clarity of the law with exceptions and strained interpretations.
When terrible things happen, reason is too easily bypassed in the rush to right a perceived wrong.
The discomforting truth is that end-of-life issues are not about science or the law.
End-of-life issues are about morality.
You and I have learnt the hard way that caring for a loved one who is dying a slow and painful death brings into sharp focus matters which in the normal course of events remain blurry: matters of life and death, of right and wrong, of good and evil.
For those of us who do not believe in God or the afterlife, making sense of these things is a struggle.
You cared for your dying mother and I cared for my dying husband in the same city at about the same time.
Your mother and my husband were cared for by the same nurses in the same hospital ward.
During my husband's last weeks, the district nurses who called by day, and the hospice nurses who stayed overnight, were from the same pool of nurses who cared for your mother.
Like you, I witnessed the inexorable deterioration and felt the overwhelming helplessness.
There were differences of course.
Jim was 69.
He did not want to die.
And the unspoken understanding of our 42-year marriage made the journey easier for us both.
When Jim's suffering became unbearable, and he lost the power to care for himself and make his own decisions, our children and I met Jim's oncologist.
That was when I made the terrible decision to withhold active treatment.
Thereafter the ward staff, Jim's GP, the district nurse and the hospice support services gave him all the care, comfort and pain relief he needed.
He died peacefully at home three weeks later.
I was able to make that terrible decision because I had come to trust Dr A.
His care of Jim had left me in no doubt he would do anything to save my husband were it humanly possible to do so.
I contrast Dr A's conduct with that of Dr B, a specialist from another part of the hospital system whose over-prescription of pain medication was so cavalier, so uncaring.
I have no idea what Dr B's attitude to physician-assisted suicide is, but it occurred to me later that he could be the sort of person who would have no qualms about giving a fatal overdose to a patient, were it legal to do so.
At the time, all that concerned me was that he didn't care whether my husband lived or died.
Would you have wanted a physician like Dr B caring for your dying mother? Nobody wants a protracted, disagreeable death.
In her Living Will, your mother requested no further medical treatment, and to be allowed to stop eating and to choose when to stop taking fluids.
That is exactly the treatment Jim was blessed with in his final weeks.
When he didn't want to eat or drink, the nurses who kept him him clean, calm, comfortable and pain-free respected his wishes.
Nature took its course.
I'm in no doubt your mother would have had the same gentle passing had she not turned her deathbed into a battleground.
Your mother is not the first person to blame her inner turmoil in the face of death on the health services, and she won't be the last.
But that is not a problem legislation can fix.
An interview with Sean Davison was published in the Magazine section of the Otago Daily Times on June 20.
Dr Lynley Hood is a Dunedin author.
