I don’t remember the first time my mother told me she was going to kill herself. Perhaps because there has never been an explosive moment. She never sat me down to discuss it. Rather, the idea was woven into the fabric of our daily life. “I won’t be here when I’m eighty,” she says, washing dishes in the kitchen sink. I am five years old and playing with a jewelled brass box, exactly like one from my favourite animated movie musical. When I ask her if I can have it after she dies, she laughs a little and promises to leave it to me. This is not an unusual avenue of discussion for us, and soon enough we are talking about something else entirely. During a languid walk on one of those too-hot summer days, I ask the big question: “where do people go when they die?” My mother always explains things calmly, matter-of-factly. She let me go to church, encouraged me to explore different beliefs, and respected my final resting decision that religion was a little bogus, and science offered a better response to my curiosity about the afterlife of a dead racoon we had passed. I never had to wait until I was older for an answer to a question like this, and as such, death was not a taboo subject in our household. At five, however, my mind had little to no concept of what, exactly, death entailed. I wanted my mother’s box when she died, but she was never going to die.

I do remember when my uncle shot himself, on another summer day. My mother had to—very calmly—explain the meaning of the word “suicide.” I smiled at my aunt during his funeral, because I didn’t know what else to do. The sun was so bright that everything inside the funeral home looked green, including my aunt. My mother wouldn’t let us view his body. Open caskets were a surefire way to reduce the memory of a loved one to a corpse, she said. It was some time afterward that I must have connected the two ideas: my mother’s refusal to think beyond her eightieth birthday; talks about organizing everything so there would be minimal work for us girls. She wants a bottle of good scotch to chase her bottle of pills—she needs to be surrounded by her family. Her funeral is to be a party: music, laughter, free-flowing booze; no one—no one—is allowed to wear black. She is to be cremated, half buried under a lilac tree and half tossed over a waterfall, maybe somewhere she has never been before. I know my mother’s plans for death so well that I could organize her send-off into the Great Beyond right now, if it were required.

As I entered my teenage years, I could not listen to my mother discuss her own death. What had once been a subject of fascination became non-negotiably off limits. I was unable to separate the selfishness of what I saw in my uncle’s suicide from what I understood she wanted to do herself. I began to see her eagerness for my participation in her demise as a kind of personal affront to me. I told her none of this. When the fire of adolescence finally cooled and I went away to school, my mother and I became truly close again. I started to tell people frequently that my mother was my best friend. I felt like a needy child, pessimistic and petulant, if we didn’t speak every few days. The old clichéd phrase about leaving home to find home took on new significance. For me, home will always be where Mum is. 

My mother has been a personal trainer and yoga instructor for years, and has a few more downward dogs left in her before she goes. She is a vibrant woman—full of life and laughter even when her life has exhausted her. She hid her depression and small disappointments in the corners of her bedroom. As a child, I only ever saw her surface assuredness and sense of purpose crack once or twice. She weathered an abusive relationship with her own mother, an abortion, a failed marriage, the closing of a business and two moody teenagers with grace and a lion’s strength. This is not to say that my mother had a hard life, or begrudges anything regarding my sister or myself. She would not change her children for the world, and by all accounts, she has had a fortunate existence on planet Earth. 

The winter of 2014 saw my grandmother—my mother’s mother—go into a nursing home. She had fallen in her Burlington townhouse and could no longer live there safely alone. I visited around Christmas time. She pushed her walker away from her body with a fervour I was unaware she still possessed, opened up her arms and enveloped me in a weepy hug. The next time I visited she had been relegated to a wheelchair, and over the subsequent four years, I watched this woman die. She had terrified me when I was young, made my mother cry, been alien to me in my adolescence and loved me fiercely despite my teenage disinterest in her vast life, spread out like thinning paper over a migration from Europe and two world wars. The process was slow, painful. “We treat animals better,” my mum would say nearly every time we left the nursing home. My grandmother could remember the name of the town where she lived in Scotland for mere months after the war, but she could not recall my mother’s name or how they were related. My mother changed her diapers, brushed her hair, and toward the end sat steadfast at my grandmother’s bedside to ensure she was never alone, that there was always Celtic music playing. Two days before her final breath was drawn, I walked into her room at the nursing home and resisted the urge to hurtle back down the hall toward the sliding front doors. My mother crouched over my grandmother’s emaciated body, whispering words of love and stroking her head. Her chin quivered feebly as she attempted to speak, her head lolling and her eyes rolling with the effort of holding her own weight. I do not recall ever having seen anything so ugly, or having been confronted so directly with the end of a life. I had seen this in films, read it in books, but I had never smelled the smells or heard the sounds. Cheap air freshener masked the sweat and piss and decay; like someone wearing too much perfume because they forgot deodorant. All of this caused something to click. The whirring of machines designed to give my grandmother more oxygen only magnified her frailty. I have no interest in watching my mother shrivel; she deserves so much more than to have such a life half-heartedly snuffed out by one of a dozen nursing staff. I don’t want my mother to die, but everyone does. What I do want is to freeze her in time before deterioration becomes the hallmark of our relationship. Most importantly, my mother wants it to be this way.

Typically, the option of assisted dying is reserved for patients with terminal illnesses. In the United States, laws require that patients must administer lethal medication themselves. Of course, this denotes that the patient must be legally deemed of sound mind to make that decision for themselves. In Canada, laws allow doctors to induce comas and subsequently turn off any life-supporting machines. Dying is essentially the ultimate terminal illness, and by this logic, we should all have access to the right to decide how and when we go. For families like mine with a history of dementia, the line distinguishing mental capability from incapacity becomes blurry beyond a certain point, and losing control of your mental or physical functions doesn’t exactly scream “resting in peace.” If anything, the decades-long debate surrounding assisted death tells me that we still have a morbid desire to hang on to life—that is, the physical act of breathing—until the last possible second.

It isn’t easy to know that, perhaps before it is absolutely necessary, I’ll say goodbye to my mother for good, but the alternative is far more frightening for us both. My mother raised me to trust my instincts, to make decisions for myself. Growing up in an environment where a woman had such a clear and ultimate decision for herself at the end of her life was, whether I knew it or not, the beginning of a foundationally feminist upbringing. So I’ll keep a bottle of the best scotch I can find in my liquor cabinet and wait for her say-so.