In Charlotte Allen’s Washington Post op-ed, “Back off! I’m Not Dead Yet. I Don’t Want a Living Will. Why Should I?,” dated October 14, 2007, she speaks about the bad feeling she got when, preparing to go for surgery, she was repeatedly asked if she had a living will. Charlotte expressed her doubts about the benefit of a living will and about how it actually be enforced.

There might be many people involved in trying to interpret the will but the creator is likely to have no say. Unfortunately, there are likely to be enough different interpretations of the patients desires to make them impossible to agree upon, from the point of view of the physicians and family.

That is neither here nor there for the point of this entry. One thing that particularly freaked out Ms. Allen, was an anonymous call she got about hospices, when she was visiting her 93 year old father who had prostrate cancer, in which the caller said, “Then, what you have to do is take them to a hospice. That’s what they did with my mother. They’ll put him on a morphine drip, and he’ll be gone in a few days.”

Reading this sent a chill up my spine. My grandmother Chase, who was in her early 90’s, passed away at the managed care center in her retirement community late this summer. She had recently been put under hospice care. She was in much pain from bed sores and screamed horribly when she had to move or was moved.

She had been on Oxycotin briefly when, as I understand it, the hospice representative suggested she should be given morphine. She had only been on that for a few days when my sister was called and informed that a chaplain had been in to pray with grandma in the afternoon. I got a call that evening to say she had passed away. Oh, the chill is back…