My wife, Glenda, is being tortured. Right now. Today.
And we — every single one of us reading this — are complicit in her agony because our silence enables this barbarism we call “healthcare.”
California passed the End-of-Life Option Act in 2015 after years of debate following Brittany Maynard’s highly publicized fight for death with dignity. The law allows terminally ill patients with six months or less to live to request life-ending medication from their doctors.
Sounds compassionate, right? Wrong!
The law’s requirements are impossibly restrictive: patients must be mentally competent, make multiple oral requests 15 days apart, provide a written request with two witnesses and self-administer the medication themselves. What sadistic joke is this for families facing Alzheimer’s, stroke or advanced dementia?
By the time these diseases reach their horrific final stages, patients have lost the very mental capacity the law demands. They can’t make “informed decisions.” They can’t remember making requests. They certainly can’t self-administer anything.
The law that promised “death with dignity” has created a grotesque catch-22: By the time these diseases reach their final, horrific stages, patients can no longer meet the law’s requirements. They’re trapped — mentally gone but legally required to suffer until their bodies finally surrender.
Glenda was diagnosed with dementia several years ago. She is trapped in a prison of a failing body while her mind disappeared piece by agonizing piece into Alzheimer’s. When she was whole, she begged me never to let her suffer like this. I promised. But California’s law has turned me into a liar and her into a victim of state-sanctioned torture. The law that claims to offer “death with dignity” has abandoned her completely.
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Don’t misunderstand me — the hospice workers, the nurses, the care team — they are angels. They pour their hearts into caring for Glenda. They treat her with more dignity than our laws do.
But even these compassionate souls are handcuffed by the very system they serve. When they tell me, “She’s comfortable,” or “We’re doing everything we can,” I see the pain in their eyes. They know — God, they know — that “everything they can do” is pitifully limited by laws that tie their hands behind their backs. These are people who chose caregiving because they believe in compassion and mercy, yet they’re forced to work within a system that denies them the tools to provide it.
It’s not the caregivers who are cruel — it’s the law that is cruel. It’s not the medical professionals who lack compassion — it’s the legal system that prevents them from showing it. We’ve created a framework so rigid, so fearful, so legally paranoid that it transforms healers into helpless bystanders.
We put animals out of their misery when they suffer like this. We call it humane. But human beings? We force them to suffer because politicians decided that biological existence — no matter how horrific — trumps human dignity.
Every day we delay reforming these laws, more families are destroyed. The End-of-Life Option Act is a cruel joke that helps almost no one with dementia. We need laws that honor advance directives, that respect decisions made when minds were clear.
I don’t want sympathy. I want you to help change the law. I want you to demand our legislators expand compassionate options for patients trapped by diseases that steal their final voice.
Paul Fillinger is an Air Force veteran and retired advertising executive and filmmaker. He has been married for 72 years and lives in Lafayette.