A 41-year woman with ALS threw a two-day party with her closest friends, before dying by doctor-assisted suicide.
Performance artist Betsy Davis is one of the first people in California to avail of doctor-assisted suicide since it recently passed into law.
After her diagnosis of the neurodegenerative disease that causes muscle weakness, paralysis, and ultimately, respiratory failure in 2013, she began to deteriorate, and had all but lost all control of her body.
“Early on, she knew she’d rather take her own life than succumb to a disease that kills most of its patients through suffocation,” her sister Kelly wrote in the Voice of San Diego. “Some ALS patients use ventilators and feeding tubes to prolong their lives, but that’s not what my sister wanted.
“Over the last year, I watched her increasingly struggle to eat and speak and do the simple things the rest of us take for granted, like scratch an itch or brush a stray hair from her eyes. No longer able to walk, she spent most of the day in bed.”
So Betsy decided she wanted to leave this world on her own terms, and began to plan her ‘Right to Die’ party.
“Dear rebirth participants you're all very brave for sending me off on my journey,” she wrote on the party’s invitation. “There are no rules. Wear what you want, speak your mind, dance, hop, chant, sing, pray, but do not cry in front of me. Oh, OK one rule.”
She also included a schedule for the party, which included the time she was going to take the lethal drugs and slip into a coma.
During the weekend she and her guests ate pizza, drank cocktails and watched her favourite movie and listened to music on the porch of a house in the beautiful Southern California town of Ojai.
“Obviously [the party] was hard for me. It's still hard for me,” wrote Kelly. “The worst was needing to leave the room every now and then, because I would get choked up. But people got it. They understood how much she was suffering and that she was fine with her decision. They respected that. They knew she wanted it to be a joyous occasion.”
At 6.45pm, with her sister, her doctor, her caretaker and her massage therapist by her side, Betsy took the drugs. Four hours later she died.
Photos by Niels Alpert via Associated Press.
