Probably won't resuscitate (by Danny Chamovitz)

“By all means resuscitate! … implies a splendid life, one not always delightful, but clearly fascinating and fulfilling. A life that, given the essential ingredient of an alert mind, I would want prolonged even at the expense of broken ribs and skin burns from heroic resuscitation.” This is how my father David Chamovitz describes his choice for the title of his autobiography.

Unfortunately, as I write this, the ingredient of an alert mind no longer holds for him. As he lies in the hospital, recovering from pneumonia, his mind has escaped to conversations with his brothers Irv, Allen and Jerry, all long dead. At 88, he is suffering from dementia likely brought on my numerous mini-strokes. Over the past year his cognitive abilities have rapidly declined as he has also lost physical control of walking.

However throughout this, we have been immensely blessed as he has maintained his loving demeanor. And even now, as most of his day is spent lost in yesteryear, he has brief moments of surprising clarity, as when each of his five grandchildren visited him over the past few days. For each he managed to open his eyes, recognize, and give a loving sentence, specific for each one, only to then retreat to conversations with those no longer among us, or to admonitions to let him go home.

“To go home”. Therein lies the rub.

Is he asking to go back to his apartment, to his bed, to Marcia? Or is he asking to go home in the biblical sense? “To go home” is the idiom that my father would often use for his patients, perhaps to make death easier for their loved ones.

Indeed over the past several weeks, as his rapid decline became clear even to him, my father more than once questioned the need to keep living. The pain of his decline, and the panic it induced in him, led him to clearly tell me, about one month ago, that the joy of life, the joy of being around family, did not make his suffering worthwhile anymore. That he had come to terms with the fact that he was not going to improve, and that while he no longer felt a need to live. That daily life was too difficult.

This was the last completely coherent conversation I had with him.

So now as we contemplate our next steps, my sister Raina and I struggle with postponing the looming loss of a parent. On the other hand, my father was clear in his wish – prolong his life only if he has an alert mind. I think love for a parent mandates that we honor this wish.

Epilogue: My father passed away peacefully on January 6, 2014, with my mother and his wonderful care-taker Theodora at his side. Five days earlier we succeeded in honoring his wish and had him released from the hospital to palliative care at home. Among his final words: "likewise" in response to me telling him "I love you", "Shut up!" in response to repeated requests to open his mouth to take medicine, "Hi sweetheart", to my sister the morning before he died.