Achieving a Pain-Free and Dignified End-of-Life Experience for a Loved One

And I can't imagine people who actually would try and do something on their own. And so having this, or I'll call it service, available, and the comfort that you get in knowing exactly what would happen and that it was completely pain-free for my mom. My name is Chris Ground. My mom, Barbara D. Ground, my mom, we employed the, um, Empowered Endings for her end of life and with great satisfaction. My sister had taken over the care of my mom due to some of the challenges that she was-- has from a physical and, um, medical standpoint. After a year, it had become really very, uh, arduous for her and her husband, and, uh, she had decided at that point that she just couldn't do it anymore. So started looking at alternatives, and my mom, who was used to someone who had been with her for eight years taking care of her full-time in her home, and it was a point where my mom just did not want to have anybody else come in. So we were a bit in a quagmire at that point. And so at, at one point when we had started talking about bringing in other people besides my sister, I was not in any position to be able to, to do it. I could go down and relieve her and her husband on occasion, but not that often. And my mom, I think, at that point said, "My quality of life is just not there." And I think that culminated into a point where she wanted to have some control over the end of her life. The way this all came about is she was on hospice and the nurse practitioner from hospice who did a regular checkup on her came in. My sister and I and my wife happened to be there at the time, and my mom, unbeknownst to us, expressed a desire to essentially end her life and wanted to know what the options were. And to his credit, the nurse practitioner was extremely good in explaining the details behind how this could happen. I had no idea that this was even legal, but as he explained, it is legal in California and several other states. He explained the process in detail to my mom, and then once he left, we sat down, my sister and I, and we, again, we were kind of blown away, but we sat down with my mom and just said, "Mom, are you sure this is what you want?" And she expressed the fact that she'd been thinking about it for a while. And the way she explained it from a quality of life standpoint, she said, "You know, I wake up and I'm looking..." The only time that she was comfortable and not in pain was at night when she was sleeping. And so every time she'd wake up, she'd sit there and think that, "Okay, I've got a whole day that every single breath is going to be difficult for me and painful," and that's just no quality of life, as she said. So at that point, I said, "Okay, Mom, if, if this is something you wanna do, I will look into it, and I'll start talking to a few companies. It doesn't mean we have to engage at all, but that'll be completely up to you." And my mom was really sharp. I mean, she was sharp to the end, for sure. And so I started calling around. I called several organizations, and Empowered Endings was one of them. I got a very good feel for the way they seemed to conduct their business and their practice, if you will. And I, uh, I looked at their website. I liked their philosophy. They were, uh, relatively local to where my mom was. And so at that point, I called them to talk to them, and we arranged for Dr. Bob to, uh, visit my mom and get an assessment in terms of what he felt. There is a, uh, a criteria and restrictions on who is eligible to be able to qualify for medically-assisted death. And so he sat down with my mom. He s- verified that he was, and at that point, she decided she wanted to move forward with them. For me and my sister and frankly, and for my wife, who we've been together for over 50 years, and so she's a huge part of our family, it was extremely comforting because I sat and I watched my mom, and she was not having a good life at this point, and she knew it and she wanted out. And to have the support that we got from Dr. Bob and his staff meant so much to us. They walked us through the-- exactly what would happen and what could be expected, and he has a ton of experience in this area, and he made us feel not only very educated about the process, everybody on his staff were extremely sensitive to what we were going through. And so it made the process much easier, much more comfortable. After going through our own experience, I think that as my mom expressed, her quality of life had degradated to a point where it was just-- it was no quality of life at all. And I can't imagine not having a way to be able to take control of that part of your life, if you will, your end of life. As we watched her slip away, she was-- The expression on her face is she, she was out of pain, and she was free again, and you could just see that she was in a very, very good place, and that meant the world to us.