21 July 2021

July brings heat, and I am still numb. Tragedy beyond understanding hit in March, and you would have been bowed under the weight of it. I can hardly bring myself to feel lighter knowing that. That tragedy is not for me to describe, not here, but I can’t gloss over the emptiness, the confusion, and the wound that that second loss brought.

I am brokenhearted. My grief is stubborn and shocking in its depth. It’s me I’m sorry for, of course. I miss you. I look ahead to years of not seeing you, and my heart aches. I go to call you and remember. Your house is standing empty. Probate is crawling ever so slightly forward. I am angry. I am remembering the confusion when you were in hospital. The lack of information. Hearing nothing. And then being told you were at end of life. I vividly recall speaking to you, and you did not want to die. You told them to continue with dialysis.

However many days later (10? 14?), they wouldn’t.

I butt up against this cold fact, and my anger grows.

Who has the right to decide when someone else must die?

It happens all the time. Euthanasia is illegal, but withholding medical aid isn’t.

You wanted them to continue.

If it hurt you, if your body couldn’t take it, if you died under dialysis. That was your right. Your choice.

I don’t know if better decisions could have been made to stop the pandemic. To make hospitals safer for negative patients. To safeguard dialysis units to protect the vulnerable. Running down the NHS undoubtedly contributed to thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of deaths. How foolish. How stupid. The people who make the life and death decisions about you, about the people you love are working in appalling conditions. Lovely people working on a battlefield. Exhausted, enduring the kind of hours the HSE would decry as unsafe.

And with the authority to decide when lives should end.