Lecretia's Choice

by Matt Vickers

  ‘She’s gone,’ Larry said, his voice cracking.

  I just held her hand and wept, while her parents wept beside me.

  My wife was so brave. She did not complain, cry out, lash out, moan, scream, or cry. She just struggled for breath, and then she died.

  And even now I think: what could we have done differently? Should I have tilted her head further to clear more of the fluids in her throat? Should I have drugged her up on more morphine, the thing she didn’t want and which didn’t seem to work anyway? How much pain was she in? How much had she suffered? Was she afraid? She couldn’t speak to tell us how she was feeling, but she opened her other eye after it had been closed for so long. When I think of the reasons why eyes widen—fear, surprise, pain—I become terrified of what she might have felt in her final moments. She wanted a loving goodbye. I guess she got as close to that as she could hope for within the law. But it wasn’t neat and tidy. It wasn’t painless. It would be terrifying to struggle for breath for an hour and a half. I don’t think the fact you’re dying would change that. I think it would make it worse.

  If I’ve reconciled myself to the way Lecretia died, the drowning, it’s because I’ve taken comfort in the fact that it was over relatively quickly. But those last few hours—if she’d had the choice, and could have said so—would she have wanted to live them? Those last few hours felt unkind and unnecessary. They were empty of meaning. There was only pain and sorrow and wishing that it would be over.

  After she died, I looked at her. Her body was still, her face fixed in its expression. I put my thumb on her eyelids and closed each like a window-shade. I put my hand under her chin, and closed her mouth. It stayed shut. Her hand, which I held, started to cool. It was over.

  Chapter 23

  I COULDN’T SLEEP of course. I began calling people. Some of them burst into tears over the phone. No one was surprised that it had happened, though some were surprised that it had happened so soon.

  I wasn’t crying. I was done crying for now. I wrote a media release and sent the news out: On Friday 5 June 2015, at 12.35 am, Lecretia Seales, the forty-two-year-old Wellington lawyer with terminal brain cancer, died of natural causes ... Ms Seales’ death came just hours after her family and lawyers received Justice Collins’ full judgment. The judge has embargoed his decision until 15.00 hours today.

  We knew what the judgment was, even if the public didn’t. In a few hours I would have to stand in front of the media and tell them that Lecretia had not got the judgment she sought.

  Natural causes. It wasn’t quite right. Lecretia’s body had turned against her. The soft machinery inside her head had slipped a gear and lost control. It didn’t feel natural.

  But I needed to signal that she hadn’t been helped. I didn’t want that to be an open question. I wanted people to be sad that she died, not wonder whether she had been assisted. I wanted the question in people’s minds to be: What was Justice Collins’ ruling? Not whether her doctor had helped her to die.

  A media briefing was scheduled for 3 pm. I finalised my statement. I knew we had to create the biggest impact we could, to stick the spurs deep into the government’s flank and goad them to action. With the judgment not going our way, it was our last chance. Someone brought me in lunch and a glass of whisky. I didn’t touch either. I walked into the briefing room to almost total silence, the only sound the snapping of cameras and barely perceptible scribble of pens on notebooks, and gave them the news that Lecretia had died, expressing my disappointment at Justice Collins’ ruling.

  It took fifteen minutes to read through my statement. There was no applause, just an uncomfortable silence. I folded up the paper, put it back in my pocket, and then turned towards the door and walked out. The only sound I could hear was the click of camera shutters and the clack of my shoes on the parquet floor as I left.

  In the days that followed, I felt the intense scrutiny of the country and the world on us. The delivery of the judgment and my wife’s passing were like a great rock thrown into water, sending waves rippling outward. At the crest of every ripple, people were making their own judgments, asking their own questions, drawing conclusions. I understood then that for many people the most significant day in my wife’s short life was her last day. Her wedding day, her graduation, her first steps: these were the special memories of a select few. Most would remember Lecretia for the day she died, and the judgment she received on that day. And I wasn’t really prepared for that. I wasn’t prepared for people to see my wife’s life as a tragedy. Because so much of it wasn’t.

  After Lecretia died, on the day the High Court ruled against her right to choose how her life ended, I was afraid that everything about her would be reduced to this single event. I wanted people to know how truly special she was, and how much of her life was a love story, and how much she achieved. I wanted all the sadness to be an epilogue, and not the climax.

  We had called a funeral home. I’d picked one at random. Keith, the funeral director, arrived midmorning with a colleague. He was a tall man with grey hair and a slate-blue suit and he looked the part. He was friendly but not too friendly. His voice was clear but only as loud as it needed to be. There were decisions: What casket would Lecretia like? What flowers would she want? Had we thought about music?

  Keith took Lecretia’s body away. They covered her with a sheet and wheeled her out on a gurney, up our switchback pathway to the main road where the hearse was parked. It was a grey day and the sky was concrete. It bothered me that cars were driving past as we came out to the road. It all bothered me. None of it made any sense. The funeral home staff were dressed in grey suits and they weren’t smiling and I felt like I would have punched them if they did. I watched as the hearse pulled away from the curb. I didn’t want my wife to leave that way. I didn’t want her to leave at all.

  To keep busy I moved almost everything from the hospital up to our garage for collection. The hoist, the bed. I kept the electric armchair in the house and I sat in it, pushing the button to make the footrest come up. I drank some beer. Someone brought dinner over for us. We ate it and one of Lecretia’s friends organised a roster for people to bring us meals. We were showered with kindness.

  Flowers began arriving, big bouquets of lilies and chrysanthemums, orchids in pots, buckets of hyacinths and hydrangeas. We arranged them in our living room in front of the fireplace. And cards too, from people Lecretia knew well and others she hadn’t seen in years. Cards that offered condolences to me, or to her parents, or to her parents and siblings, or to all of us. They were arranged on the mantelpiece—where we used to put birthday cards and Christmas cards—but there were too many cards, and they started piling up on the dining room table, along with letters and other gifts too. I kept having to make new piles as the existing ones spilled over onto the floor. I asked Andrew, Kat’s husband, to keep a record, so I could write back to all of these people.

  The undertaker brought Lecretia back to the house in the rosewood coffin that we’d selected for her. We had to carry the coffin back down the switchback path. It took six of us, and it was heavy. We went slowly, careful not to scratch the beautiful varnished surface. Once we had it safely down the path, the coffin was wheeled into the house on a special stainless-steel trolley. Somewhere in the world there is a company that makes these things, I thought. There is someone who dreamt this up. How long, I wondered, stupidly, had the inventor waited before being carried out by their own invention?

  The coffin was brought into the living room and arranged in exactly the spot where Lecretia had last been alive in her bed. The staff loosened the screws and lifted the lid of the casket, and leaned it against a nearby wall. Lecretia’s name was engraved on a silver nameplate on the lid. I checked the spelling as it was the thing I was most nervous about. People always got it wrong.

  In her coffin Lecretia was wearing the green dress we’d chosen for her. I was upset that strangers had dressed her. I didn’t want to think about it too much. At her waist, her left hand was folde
d over her right, so that her wedding ring was visible. I put my hand on her hand and it was cold: colder than it had ever been. Her fingers felt like a porcelain doll’s. I suppose, if not for the embalmer’s work, they would have been the colour of a porcelain doll’s too. They were beautiful.

  But her face and neck looked wrong. Her head was too low, and her neck was shorter than the elegant neck I remembered, and where the neck and chest met, her skin had gathered in three narrow pleats. She didn’t carry herself that way. She didn’t sleep that way. On her head was one of her hairpieces, but it was arranged strangely.

  ‘How does she look?’ asked the director.

  ‘Fine. Good,’ I lied. I didn’t want them to take her away again. I didn’t want them to touch her again.

  ‘You can rearrange her if you want. It’s safe to move her if you’re gentle.’

  ‘Okay.’

  People began arriving. Some didn’t want to look at her. Some took a brief glance; others leaned over her coffin and wept. People cry differently. Some cry with their mouths and noses. Some cry from deep in their chest and shudder as they breathe. Some don’t appear to cry at all. Their face is a mask and then they hold you and you feel them crying. And the way they hold you is different from the way you’re held by a lover. They hold their arms out like a child, or like you’re a child, and the arms go around you, and their head is rested on your shoulder, and you feel them shake in your chest and on your cheek.

  A lover is held with one arm around the shoulder and one around the waist, or both around the waist. You pull each other together, and every inch of you is connected from chest to thigh, or you pull your chest back, just a little, so you can face each other, and smile, and kiss. I was being held like a child and I wanted to be held by a lover. I wanted to be held by my wife. I wanted everyone to leave so I could climb in that coffin with her and hold her. And maybe I would have, if I wasn’t scared the trolley would break or that I would damage her. She looked so fragile, my porcelain doll, and the trolley was such a flimsy-looking thing.

  After a few hours I removed her hairpiece. I took her head and I lifted it slightly, back into the coffin, smoothing away those three offensive pleats in the paper-thin skin of her neck. She still looked different, but she was more recognisably my wife. She looked so much better without the hairpiece. You couldn’t see where her hair had thinned from the radiotherapy, where the scar from her surgery wound around her scalp like the loop of an omega. She looked well, almost, as though she’d gone to the hairdresser to trim the last of her beautiful chestnut hair, leaving only a pixie cut.

  We spent four days and evenings in the house with Lecretia at rest in her coffin. At night I would put the lid of the coffin down, and in the morning I would take it off again. It was good to have her in the house, to have the chance to say goodbye. Alone in the house with her, I sat beside the coffin and told her everything. Everything I loved about her, everything I was guilty about, the mistakes I’d made, the deep regret at ever having hurt her feelings, even for a moment. I thought back to that incident where I hadn’t called her after getting drunk with friends, and how hurt she had been, and the expression on her face, and how I could never take that back, that it and all the other times like it were now fixed in amber and she could no longer hear me say sorry. That was the hardest part: that she’d ever been hurt or suffered at all, and that I had been the cause of any of it. She was such a good person, and she didn’t get the things she deserved: kids and a long life.

  The funeral was held at Old St Paul’s cathedral in Thorndon. It was a beautiful service. I spoke, along with Lecretia’s mother and father, her sister Kat, and her friend Angela. Sir Geoffrey Palmer gave a wonderful speech about Lecretia’s skill as a lawyer, and another former colleague from the Law Commission, Professor John Burrows QC, spoke about how much fun Lecretia was to work with, and how she had no qualms about telling him when she thought he was wrong about something.

  At the end of the service, I played a video that Lecretia had recorded the weekend before she went into surgery. She was healthy and whole, and spoke about how much she’d enjoyed her life and how lucky she felt to have had everything she had. Even though the video was four years old, Lecretia’s attitude had not changed since then—she remained grateful and joyous right up until the end. The words she said on the video could have been said only a week ago.

  After the eulogies, I gathered with the other pallbearers and we carried Lecretia’s coffin out to the waiting hearse. The four or five hundred guests followed and assembled outside the church. The hearse drove away. Among all those friends and family I felt very alone.

  Chapter 24

  IT FEELS LIKE I’m moving through a different world now. It’s adjacent to the old one, but it’s a world in which Lecretia does not exist, and for that reason it seems strange and foreign. The rules for me are different now, and I find it hard to embrace them. I want to wish this strange new world away and return to the old one with all its love and kindness. But Lecretia is still here. Over time the atoms of her body will disperse, becoming part of the earth, of trees, of animals, of flowers. Those atoms, before they coalesced into the miracle she was, resided in fish and dinosaurs and sabre-toothed tigers. The building blocks of life have their permanence in atoms, and the miracle of consciousness is like a spark thrown off by the flick of flint against the dull edge of the periodic table. And I am so grateful that I saw Lecretia’s moment burn so brightly. I miss her terribly.

  In the days and weeks and months that followed Lecretia’s death and funeral, the issue of assisted dying was widely debated. A petition asking parliament to investigate public attitudes to assisted dying attracted thousands of signatures. It became the trigger for a select committee to canvass public opinion and explore whether the law should be changed. The select committee received over 19,000 submissions and is likely to deliver a report in 2017.

  Once the petition was handed in, I stuck around home for a few weeks, not working. Her memory was still overwhelming for me. I read books, and people sent me their stories, which was both a comfort and very tough too. It was overwhelming to hear some of the things other people had gone through when losing someone. The dirty little secret of palliative care is that some people have atrocious experiences, not through any fault of the carers, more as a result of their illnesses, but afterwards they’re not around to complain about it, and their families are so upset that they keep quiet as they don’t want to relive the memory. They just smoulder in anger and pray and hope the same thing doesn’t happen to them when it’s their turn.

  I had to get away. In July I booked flights to go overseas and I spent two months travelling. I went on a cruise in the Baltic Sea, explored Denmark and Iceland, and experienced the sights and sounds of New York for the first time. I backpacked for five weeks in Mexico in August and September. I met a woman there, a wonderful lady, and spent two weeks living with her in Mexico City. Part of me wanted to give up on my ties to New Zealand and stay in Mexico, with its food and its people and this woman who cared for me a great deal, who through her kindness and affection was mending my heart. Being in a different culture and using a different language was a break from a reality that had been so difficult for so long, as though I had escaped to another life.

  When I finally came home again, I picked up my bags at the airport and my mother and sister collected me. They drove me back to my place. All the ramps we’d put in for Lecretia’s wheelchair had gone. My mum and sister wanted to come in, but I didn’t want them to. I entered the house alone, for the first time in months, hoping my absence had exorcised it of memory. But it had not. Things came flooding back. Our photographs were still arrayed on the table, every object told a story, and those stories all led back to Lecretia. I felt the full force of her presence, and her absence. All those months of numbness dropped away and I felt the magnitude of what I’d lost. And I had lost everything I cared about.

  It was the middle of the afternoon, and yet I cried myself to sle
ep.

  Chapter 25

  SHORTLY BEFORE CHRISTMAS, I was contacted by the New Zealand Herald. The Herald is the most widely read newspaper in the country, and it had decided to make Lecretia New Zealander of the Year. I was stunned. I was immensely proud of my wife.

  Lecretia would have been embarrassed by it, but I think, underneath it all, a little proud, too. She did devote her life to helping others, though in a less obvious way: through law and policy advice that benefited all New Zealanders. There are many others who do such work, and it was only because of Lecretia’s case that anyone was aware of her other contributions over the years. But to have her recognised was a balm for me. I couldn’t bear the idea of her being forgotten. People would know who she was and what she did.

  A few days after the announcement, I was at home contemplating my options for Christmas. I didn’t know what to do. I hadn’t spent a family Christmas with my mother or my father for years. My sister Natalie’s son Thomas was growing up. But so was Rafferty, Jeremy and Kate’s son, and Lecretia and I adored him so much that I wanted to see him too.

  In the end I booked flights to Tauranga the day before Christmas Eve, and Larry picked me up at the airport. There were grey skies over the Bay of Plenty as we drove home, talking about everything that had happened that year. I brought Larry up to date with the petition and the select committee and he responded appreciatively, but I sensed his continuing sorrow at his daughter’s loss, and how my presence was just another reminder of the fact that she was gone.

  When I stayed with Lecretia’s parents, I slept in her bedroom at the back of the house. Some of her clothes and hats still hung on a stand, and the plush animals she’d never discarded were piled high in a corner of the room: bears and dogs and rabbits. On her neatly ordered bookshelf you could track her reading: from Enid Blyton through to Sweet Valley High and teenage romances, Stephen King and the racier Jilly Cooper. There were faded cookbooks, and then her law textbooks, serious and heavy tomes. Outside her window the sun was setting over trees and bushes and the peaked roofs cresting through the canopy, and orange light filled the room.