After receiving a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s five years ago, Sandy Bem decided she would kill herself before the disease completely overtook her life. In May, Sandy and her husband Daryl gathered family to announce that she had set the date:
[Bem’s daughter] Emily says when she showed up at the meeting she was still very angry, convinced that her mother should hold on. Emily, who also lives in Ithaca, has a toddler. She wanted more time with her mother. But over the course of the meeting, this feeling began to ebb. “It was just so obvious that this is about as good as it gets for a human exit,” Emily says. “She was surrounded by everyone who loved her, they were telling her how and why they loved her. This was not a bad way to go.”
Two days later, Sandy’s friends and family gathered again, this time at the home of Sandy’s best friend. They all met for dinner as Sandy, across town, got ready to kill herself.
Sandy, with Daryl at her side, went on a long walk and watched a last movie — Mary Poppins, one of the few films Sandy could still follow. Assisted suicide is not legal in New York, so Sandy went into the bedroom alone to drink the drug overdose she’d ordered online. She followed it with a glass of wine. Finally, Sandy called her husband of 49 years into the room to ask for a last favor. “She asked if I would get into the bed with her,” Daryl says, which he did. “I held her, and I could hear her breathing. Just sort of watching every moment until her breathing just kind of stopped.”
And here is the thing. The relatives and friend I spoke to agree that something in this process made dealing with Sandy’s death much easier. “This is going to sound really funny, but I wouldn’t have had it any other way,” Emily Bem says. “It made it less like a grieving process and less like a sort of horrible thing that had happened, and more like something that made sense and felt right and actually had some joy to it in its own way.”
The Dish thread on different approaches to a loved one’s passing, “A Good Death,” is here.
The Dish 