Right To

This is my Uncle Frank. I spoke to him for the last time on Saturday. Home with Hospice, he was waiting on friends to bring his favorite food, pizza. He apologized that he wouldn’t be around to read my book when it was finished. I told him that he’ll have access wherever he ends up. We laughed about the name of his high school mascot (the Authors) and said how much we love each other. A Mozart concerto played in the background.

On Sunday, after a morning with family, Uncle Frank took his final pill. He lived in the state of Washington where Right to Die is legal.

This is my dad. Yesterday I found him in his bed at his nursing home. He ate his lunch of overcooked manicotti and brown vegetables while sitting in his own shit because no one had come to clean him since the day before. Once again, there were no pants in his closet. After the aide and I cleaned him up, and Mom found him some pants, he and I sat together in the hallway outside of his room. The doorway across from his is covered in biohazard signs, warning of the spread of droplets, but the door is open and the staff walk past the stack of clean nursing gowns. The sounds of blaring game shows and shouting crime dramas fill the hallway along with the smell of stale feces. The windows are nailed shut. The residents are forbidden from leaving the floor. “His finger might be broken,” an aide points out to me. A man in a wheelchair pulls himself up to us and asks us to kill him.

Dad lives in the state of New York, where Right to Die is illegal.