This will be my second Mother’s Day without my mom.
Fay Hoh Yin died in July 2020 after courageously battling lymphoma for six years. During that time, she endured multiple rounds of chemotherapy, radiation and — in just the last six months of her life — 25 blood transfusions. No one can say that Mom gave up.
My parents moved to Wilmington in 1960 to work at the DuPont Experimental Station, helping to fuel America’s postwar boom in science and technology. I was born in Memorial Hospital two years later and grew up in Brandywine Hundred. After college, I moved to New York City.
My mother’s perspective on death was deeply informed by having cared for both of my grandmothers through long illnesses. One died peacefully with a minimum of suffering, while the other lingered for two years in distress. My mother was haunted by her mother’s heart-rending plea, “I want to die, but I cannot die. I want to live, but I cannot live.”
In late 2019, Mom moved in with me, so I could care for her. In April, as her condition worsened, she asked me if we could move to New Jersey because medical aid in dying is legal there. As a mentally capable person with less than six months to live, she could get a prescription there that would allow her to die peacefully when she could endure no more. I spent the entire weekend looking into short-term rentals and new oncologists. In the end, we realized it was just too complicated, given how weak she was.
It seemed like a cruel joke that salvation lay just a few miles across the river.
By the end, Mom was just skin and bones. She struggled to breathe. She could no longer walk nor control her bodily functions. It pained her that her children had to witness her complete devastation. She had lived a good life, discharged all her duties faithfully. She couldn’t understand why she should be made to suffer to the bitter end. We don’t inflict that cruelty on the animals we love. Why, then, on the people we love most?
My mother did not find suffering to be ennobling nor honorable — even with the best palliative care — which we had and which I fully support.
Medical aid in dying relieves two kinds of suffering: The first is the physical pain caused by some terminal illnesses. But the second is the psychic pain of fearing a drawn-out death. For my mom, this fear started in 2014 and built to a crescendo in the last year of her life. Her increasingly desperate search for some measure of agency robbed us of precious time that my family would otherwise have enjoyed. She viewed medical aid in dying as an insurance policy that she might use only at the very end.
We don’t ask anyone else to choose — or even consider — medical aid in dying. It is absolutely an individual decision. We only ask that you not block people like my mother from having the option and the peace of mind that comes with it.
Medical aid in dying has been legal for a quarter-century, first in Oregon and now in 10 states and Washington, D.C. In all that time, there has not been a single documented case of abuse or coercion. Why should Delawareans be deprived of the same end-of-life mercy that their neighbors have in New Jersey?
You may ask why medical aid in dying is a priority, when our society is struggling with so much sickness, poverty, division, injustice and violence. I would simply say, here is one form of suffering that we can end right now — together. If Delaware passes medical aid-in-dying laws this year, people like my mother can have the peace they crave without hurting anyone else. To me, that would be a tremendous act of compassion, kindness and love toward the people who are already walking the last mile of life.
Monona A. Yin resides in the Wilmington home of her late mother, Fay Hoh Yin, and in Brooklyn, New York.
