Tropico Perspective:

My uncle passed away the first week of February. He was one of the most giving and selfless souls I have ever known.

He never had the ambitions of my father, or the willingness to take risks like his sister, but he took great pleasure in the company of his friends and searching for small treasures in odd places. He always lived within his means and seemed content to do so, never asked for much and gave much more in return.

This is not so much a story about his life — I am sure all of us have had friends or relatives who have positively influenced our lives. It is more a story of his death and the frustrations of a man who asked for little more than the ability to govern the manner of his exit from this life and his inability to get what he desperately needed.

He entered the hospital with the expectation that the treatment for a long-term illness wasn’t going well, and that he faced an extended stay in a hospice facility. When it became clear that the doctors could do little to help him fight the infection that was taking hold of his system, what he had hoped would be an ordeal of a few months became a sentence of a few days.

He understood and accepted what was happening to him and elected, with the support of his friends and only remaining relative, to forgo any further treatment to extend his life. Most of us will have to come to terms with this decision, either for ourselves or for those we love. It is a moment of clarity and understanding, almost dwarfing the enormity of the decision itself.

It is what followed that was enormously unfair. Not in the manner of the care he received, which was both compassionate and attentive, and not in the degree of pain he endured. What was unfair was the waiting.

Doctors who oppose physician-assisted end-of-life care may claim that drugs exist to mitigate the pain and make the last few hours or days of life more peacefully and comfortably endured, but no drug exists to assuage the torture of the waiting. Perhaps they have either become callous to the mental anguish that cannot be treated through an intravenous drip, or refuse to believe that pain not associated with a neural receptor is worth treating.