The Last Right

by Marianne Thamm

  I said to him, “If you manage to do this, what effect will it have on your parents?” And he said, “Well, they will be very sad, no doubt, but a major problem will be removed from their lives.”

  He understood what it would mean for his parents, because they had walked such a long road with him and he felt it would be good for both of them if he died. He said they would feel the pain but their problems would be over. So, he saw his death as sad for them but liberating. Because his mother could go out again without having to stay at home with him. He was thinking of others as well.

  He began seeing his death as a gift to himself and to his parents, to those who loved him. They would not be put through the agony of watching him writhe on a bed.

  He had this ability to care for others, as well as think through his own issues. Now a suicide doesn’t think like that. A suicide doesn’t stop to ask, what is this going to do to my family?

  Some suicidal people can be vindictive. “I’ll get my father for this,” or “This boyfriend dropped me, I will give him pain for the rest of his life.”

  That kind of vindictiveness is often part of suicide. That was not present in him. Craig was on a different kind of mission. He could not see any future; he could not see how his dying by normal means could benefit anybody. If he had lived to 40 or 50, he could not see living longer as a gift to anybody.

  I have often wondered why he wanted to write about it. Dying does not make you famous, I told him. He was of the opinion that he wanted people to know that a person deciding to die could be doing the right thing. He also hoped that people could read about his life and think deeply about their own situations, hoping that it would turn them to gratitude.

  The right people arrived at the right time for him and I believe, with Craig, that somehow God was in on this thing.

  People who will be reading this book will probably wonder how a Christian minister who had been a bishop of a church could not have stopped this young man from doing what he was going to do, could not have preached to him about the evil of suicide.

  For, as I have said, taking his life was not evil. Of course if one is forced to listen to someone who wants to murder and rape it is entirely different. They want to destroy others and that cannot be condoned.

  What I am saying about Craig is that he became convinced that in taking his life God would agree with him and receive him. He never doubted that. Nor did he doubt that his parents would be liberated from a deep burden. There is a difference here.

  When it was all over I thought, if you show this on the stage you would never believe it.

  Life is a very messy business and most of us want it to be clean and sterile. But the messiness of life, which someone like Craig brings to us, is a sort of spiritual compost, something that provokes us to learn, think and grow.

  For religious people thinking about assisted suicide, self-killing or euthanasia is a whole new territory we need to move into. If the Church is honest, people will admit that over the centuries positions have shifted on many things: slavery, divorce, equal rights for women, for example.

  Craig’s journey, if it is going to be helpful, would need to be read critically and carefully and I hope people will recognise the sacrifices some parents have to make for the good of their children.

  I hope they can recognise that a person can make a decision that they should die rather than face what we have been talking about, and allow them to make that decision without trying to stop them; I think, I hope, people will come to that conclusion.

  And I hope that out of it all comes a deep desire to listen more, to not be so critical, to learn something of what it means to enter another person’s world, to park yourself to the side, and to know what it means to live with mystery and not problems, because mysteries have to be experienced deeply.

  12

  Sandy Coffey: Bosnia or Mauritius

  Sandy Coffey is an established photographer and magazine feature writer who lives in Port Elizabeth with her husband, David, and sons Peter (15) and Jonathan (13).

  Sandy says her work as a photographer is “about getting closer to the essence of life”, and meeting Craig during the last four months of his life, she feels, did exactly that.

  Sandy had intended to write Craig’s book, but the events that unfolded were far too intimate to allow for the cool distance so often required to document a traumatic story of this nature.

  She photographed his body, his possessions and whatever he needed to construct a lasting visual collage of his life. The two emailed each other almost every day until the end, and some of these emails, documented in Chapter 16, form an important record of Craig’s final state of mind.

  PATSY AND NEVILLE got hold of me through a friend of mine. They had seen something I had written for a woman’s magazine and they were looking for someone to work with Craig on a book.

  They wouldn’t say much to me on the phone the night before. But I thought there might be a story in this.

  So, the next day I went to Neville’s office at the shopping complex he is involved in. Patsy was there and she was crying. And for me that was a sign. There is a part of me that is so intrinsically interested in human drama, in the proper sense of the word, not the dramatic stuff.

  And they told me they had a 28-year-old son who was suffering from a disease I had never heard of. I remember thinking as they were explaining: “What’s the story?”

  And then they told me he had just applied to Dignitas in Switzerland to go and have an assisted suicide. And then there was just silence. I remember thinking: “This is an extraordinary story. He is still alive!”

  They suggested I meet and talk to him. I told them I didn’t think that this story was a magazine article, that it was something bigger and that I would possibly hand it over to a friend of mine who is a writer.

  But Patsy suggested that I make up my mind after I’d met him.

  The next day I went to their house. I expected to walk in and find him lying in a bed in a dark room. But I found him standing there with his big arms stretched wide open and he hugged me.

  He was so skinny because he had stopped eating solids by then and he said, “Thank you for writing my story.”

  I told him I hadn’t decided yet.

  He invited me in for some tea.

  We sat down and the first thing I said to him was: “You don’t look depressed,” and he replied that that was why he wanted to write his story, because “I am not depressed. I am simply making a choice.”

  I was immediately interested. I couldn’t believe, on some level, that I had been handed this story, and because of my curiosity I agreed to it.

  I went home that night and told my husband, who said I must be insane and that I had no idea what I was getting myself into. But I had made up my mind.

  I decided the only way I could tackle this was to ask him the questions I wanted to ask. I had to be the audience, so to speak. We began meeting daily. I didn’t carry a voice recorder and I didn’t write while he was speaking because I felt that might get in the way of the flow.

  So, what I would do was go home at night and write all the questions down and email them to him. He was better at articulating in writing than verbally, and I didn’t want my or his thoughts to be misconstrued.

  I spent the next four months immersed in Craig.

  For example, Craig would phone and after a while I’d ask, “How are you going to feel when you buy a one-way ticket to Zurich?” He equated it to being asked to choose between a holiday in Bosnia or Mauritius. “A no-brainer,” he’d chuckle.

  Every now and again we would go to a hotel on the beachfront to talk. He seldom drank, but he did enjoy a vodka cocktail they made there called a Moscow Mule. The most amazing thing is that Craig would never cry. Ever. I think he was holding on so tight because he was frightened that if he did cry people would say he’s “emotional” about wanting to end his life.

  So, that is what we would do. Some days we would have one hour. Some days we would
not have any if he wasn’t feeling good. Some days it would be three hours. He would usually be calm when he met me, but sometimes he would be sad, sometimes silent and sometimes we’d just have an ordinary conversation.

  Then I would get the phone calls, like: “Sandy, I have found another fibroma!”

  I set up a whole studio for him at my house. And he would run up and he would let me photograph yet another fibroma. And I would say to him, “I can’t photograph 20 fibromas.”

  Sometimes the conversation would become surreal. He would talk about how if Dignitas did not give him the “green light” he might gas himself. Then he would look up on the Internet and read up on the mortality rate, the statistics.

  And I would drive home later to my two beautiful sons who are healthy and I would think: “What the hell were we talking about back there?”

  There was a time in which I suffered quite a bit of guilt, because my kids were healthy and he was not.

  Craig embraced my kids, as did Patsy and Neville. It developed into a very close relationship because Craig promised that he would give me the truth and he made me promise, at the very beginning, that I would not try to make him change his mind. So, that was our little pact and that was sustained right through.

  But like George [Irvine], there were periods when I would be photographing when he wasn’t in pain, when he would be fantastic, when he would be talking to me and I would be thinking: “Why are you not going out into the world with this disease as an example of what you can be with it instead of disappearing with the disease?”

  There was always this discourse. Why didn’t he? I think a lot of times the only thing that stopped me from asking him was my promise to him.

  I’d try to find other ways of getting him to think about it. Indirect ways. I’d ask him to come and teach my children to play golf and he would immediately sense what I was doing and say, “Sandy, are you trying to change my mind? I am not going to teach your children to play golf. I am leaving soon.”

  Then I did say to him, “Why don’t you take this disease and talk about it in public, become a shining example, not a disappearing holidaymaker in life?”

  Then my next thought would be: “How do I even have a right when I have not lived with this disease?” I still have not got to the bottom of how I feel about that.

  George and I met afterwards and spoke. My personal view has still not been resolved, because each one of those arguments or those pressure points is valid.

  Sometimes I think Craig should have gone and been a beacon, but he couldn’t because he was so sick at periods of his life. I had no right to judge. I had no right to try to change him because I had promised.

  You can imagine, in my brain, going home to perfect kids and driving backwards and forwards from Summerstrand to Walmer every day, crossing between these two worlds.

  Eventually I marked a spot in the road where I stopped thinking about him. It was halfway between, and I would switch the thoughts off. And then I would go home.

  He was just such a warm and caring person. He always asked how I was, how my family was.

  Craig was a very organised person and his level of control was palpable, but he could not control the disease.

  He began to prepare his body for death. He had given up eating solids and was getting very thin. And I asked him why.

  He told me he wanted to be in perfect health for his death. He wanted his body to be ready; he did not want to end up in hospital with another obstruction. He planned his funeral, the music that would play, who would get what.

  He spoke with such pragmatism and clarity, I wondered whether he actually knew what it meant and I’d ask him that in my emails.

  At the end of it, my emotional state the last four months of his life, when he took the overdose of Dormonoct, was extremely interesting. The way I had to handle my kids. Because they knew the story.

  When I had told them that Craig decided to take his own life they were at an age where they understood suicide. And now they had to understand it through their mother who wasn’t hiding anything, and so that was an interesting process, how I explained it. I told them he was sick and he was giving up and wanted to die.

  And they would ask me, “What about trying your best?” And whether it was okay, when things weren’t working out in life, to commit suicide.

  I explained that we had never walked in his shoes and that his choosing to die was a very severe way of dealing with something that he could not control. It resulted in death, the final frontier. There is nothing after that.

  Craig definitely believed that he was going to heaven. He believed God was going to be waiting for him. He believed it was going to be better and he believed 100 per cent and that there would be “no time” where he was going, and that he would be with his mom. He believed he was going to be his mother’s [guardian] angel.

  But the problem is, his mother didn’t want an angel. She wanted Craig.

  And then there was the long excruciating wait for Dignitas to reply to him. For months we sat in this holding pattern. It was like this vortex that formed around his imminent death. Every day we waited for Dignitas to reply. It was deeply traumatic.

  Like when you wait every day for someone to go away and it is not like they are going to a happy place, you are now facing the loss of their lives and everyone is trying to be happy, accepting. Perhaps at that point we should have had an intervention with all of us, to find out how we were dealing with it.

  George went to his own little place. I just got sadder and sadder. We all had our ways of dealing with it. Patsy and Neville sought refuge in their own ways. Patsy went inwards and Neville went outwards and also buried himself in work.

  Craig went from hope to anger at every day Dignitas didn’t reply to his application. Every day we woke up with this hope… for someone to die!

  I spent more time during those four months with the Schonegevels than I did at home.

  One day Craig called me up and said, “Sandy, I have all my sports stuff here.”

  He decided who should get what. The wet suits, the golf clubs. I photographed all his worldly possessions. I looked at all this stuff and it felt to me like he was going on a long holiday, or maybe going to live in Australia. Like he was packing up and going.

  And in that process it became easier to dialogue with him. He was talking about whether 16 minutes of gas in a car was going to kill you or not. The one thing he did not want to do was die violently.

  I am a very pragmatic person and I was able to hold my emotions with him, which I think helped him. Imagine if I cried every five minutes.

  Craig was crossing off lists. Shaving his head, taking off the pictures from his bedroom walls, deleting files on his computer and sifting through his music to leave his favourites for Patsy. We now know that he was also stockpiling tablets. He didn’t want to leave a mausoleum. He was slowly demolishing all traces of himself, getting rid of the physical realm and in so doing he was traumatising Patsy beyond measure.

  There was no system to hold us, to take control. All of us would have our own little dramas but we never once sat down together and talked.

  I couldn’t speak to David any more at home. None of us really knew how to deal with it except for taking one day at a time. We had no perspective. Nobody questioned an alternative method.

  And then the terrible news. Dignitas did not give Craig the go-ahead. He phoned me and said he had a Plan B and that he would have to do it himself and that if Dignitas were not going to do it he would find a way that was non-violent.

  He said he would find another way, but he couldn’t tell me because he didn’t want to implicate anyone.

  I asked him if I would know when and he said I’d know intuitively and that he wouldn’t have to tell me.

  And I was sitting in Bloemfontein with my children when I got an SMS from Craig saying we needed to meet because “time is running out”.

  I told him I was going back to PE the next day, a Thursday. He made his first a
ttempt that Friday night. On the Saturday morning Neville phoned me to say Craig tried to commit suicide the night before but that he had survived.

  I dropped everything and rushed out there. He was back home after spending time in an emergency medical facility. I lay with him on the bed and he began to come round. He was a bit delirious but he was clearly furious.

  He believed he couldn’t even kill himself properly. He could not believe he was still alive. He had worked out how to do it. He had saved his daily sleeping tablets, so that when he finally had enough of them, he did it. And he lived. He was just so fit.

  The whole household was traumatised. Nana was there and Patsy would hover around. We didn’t know whether there was any other damage caused by the overdose.

  The next day he was up again. Back on the Internet trying to get the book The Final Exit, which is a sort of suicide manual.

  Once he had found a way, the manner, which was his answer, he never spoke to me about it. He might have spoken to other people but I had no idea.

  The whole mood changed in the house. Changed more into acceptance and perhaps relief that he didn’t die and anger that they, we, had to go through it again.

  In the last week things changed. He cut me off. I think he needed to preserve all his energy for the last lap.

  The jury is still out in my head about whether he did the right thing. When I see Patsy and how she is grieving. He knew his mother’s love for him. I see her sorrow. I am not blaming him.

  And I look at the aftermath three years later and I know in his own heart he did the right thing for himself. I don’t think a future like that was ever going to be feasible for him.

  I feel privileged having been involved in a unique story of struggle. Ultimately it was a good experience for me and has changed my viewpoint on many things.

  One thing you can’t do is judge. You have no right.

  Would I take it on again knowing what I know now?

  Absolutely.

  13

  Not Quite Yet