End of Life Option Act affords us the right to die with dignity

My husband died of multiple myeloma on December 1, 2022. He was diagnosed with this incurable form of leukemia in the summer of 2019. For more than three and a half years, he endured one treatment after another, all of which failed in the future. Stop the scourge of disease.

People often write about their loved ones “losing the battle with cancer.” It’s not a fight. A battle requires two more or less equal sides to fight it out with similar weapons. Cancer had all the advantages. My husband only has his guts.

All those years, I’ve been by his side: in 17 hospitalizations; over a hundred days in Rochester at the Mayo Clinic; at his bedside in the intensive care unit for eight days after his near-fatal reaction to a chemo drug; on countless clinic visits; At home, where we had a hospital bed in the den and slept on the couch for four months and in the nursing home the last days of his life.

I lived in constant dread, never knowing when or if I would have to call 911 again or go back to Mayo in the middle of the night. I have never slept properly. I would get up during the night to make sure he was still breathing and to check his vital signs. On good days, when he goes for a walk, I’d go with him, my phone at the ready in case I had to call for help.

Although his death was inevitable, it was devastating. Although he was given gentle and loving hospice care, he was eventually stripped of his human dignity. He was an athlete, and his once strong body was crumbled by this cancer eating his bones. He’s been a professor for 40 years, and his sharp analytical mind has been clouded by years of semi-toxic drugs.

People tell me I’ll take solace from the great memories of our lives together: travel to nearly 50 countries, great adventures, shared interests in the arts, history, politics, and more.

No, my memories of the devastation of his body and mind. I am anguished by these memories crowding out almost everything else.

The mental stress I carried with me all those years started to affect me physically, too. My doctor said I had an irregular heartbeat, due to stress.

My husband was dealt a double blow by cancer: by the way it was attacking him, by the way he saw it attack me… We are both weak in body and spirit, and he was the most terrified during the last weeks of his life.

I am the founder and CEO of World Without Genocide, a human rights organization. We support people’s integrity, dignity and right to bodily autonomy. My husband lost this right.

We support Minnesota’s End of Life Option Act (SF 1813 / HF 1930). If passed, it would allow a terminally ill, mentally capable adult with a prognosis of six months or less to live, seek, obtain, and to take medicine – if they choose – to die peacefully in their sleep if their suffering becomes unbearable. This is what my husband wanted.

He didn’t have that option. Please call for this selection. Dignity is a human right.

Elaine J. Kennedy, PhD, is Executive Director of World Without Genocide at Mitchell Hamlin School of Law, Assistant Professor of Law.