When My Time Comes by Diane Rehm & John Grisham

Author:Diane Rehm & John Grisham
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2020-02-03T16:00:00+00:00

Alexa Fraser

A DEATH WITH DIGNITY SUPPORTER

Alexa Fraser lives in a lovely home in Rockville, Maryland, where I spoke with her in July 2017. She greeted me warmly. In December 2016 she had been diagnosed with soft-tissue cancer of the uterus, and now her light hair was just long enough to cover her scalp, having begun to grow back after surgery and chemotherapy—her final round of chemotherapy had been in May. Alexa has a Ph.D. in environmental studies and did a lot of work on human health exposures. Then she decided she wanted a different career, so she studied to become a Unitarian Universalist minister. At the time of our conversation, she was an intern at a local congregation.

I asked Alexa to tell me about her father, a very handsome man whose portrait hangs on the wall behind where she was sitting. He had Parkinson’s disease, she told me.

ALEXA: Well, my dad was a guy with a lot of flair. He started something called the Open University of Washington, which was a place people could go to take a class in something fun. Playing bridge, sailing, how to marry a millionaire—that was one of his classes—bringing people together. He actually sold the business to a friend but went on running tons of classes. My parents got divorced when I was quite young. He never married again because it was way too much fun to date as many women as he could.

DIANE: And how old was he when he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s?

A: He was in his late eighties, about eighty-six. He had had essential tremor, which is a condition that causes your hands to shake. When exactly that transitioned to Parkinson’s, it’s hard to know. By the end, he had other symptoms, including rigidity. He was normally very athletic. He swam all his life, he ran, he loved to sail. He had such an active and full life. He wrote and directed plays that were produced off Broadway, and was involved in theater here, too. Whatever was fun, he wanted to do, and he did it. But I noticed he was shuffling rather than walking.

D: I gather he lived independently.

A: Yes. He was about three miles away, which was actually very convenient to my son’s school. He picked him up several days a week at school, and they were the best of buddies.

D: How quickly did the disease progress?

A: Well, from what I could see, it was not progressing all that rapidly. But apparently he started to fall. And those falls made him very scared, because he loved living independently, and because he had, for a long time, planned to control the end of his days. Parkinson’s is not, as you well know, a way that you want to end your life. He had a plan, and he knew that if he fell and broke something and ended up in a nursing home, he would not be able to implement the plan. Those falls were a ticking clock for him.

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