Quality of Life
Quality of life, as it relates to growing old and enfeebled, was a subject I had long considered and read about and discussed with many of my law clients over the years. I had become fairly comfortable with my concept of where that minimum standard may be for me until the occurrence several years ago of two events pretty close in time.
The first was a conversation with a longtime friend and client about her ideal last day of life. Sue said she thought she’d like to spend her last day with good friends doing things they enjoyed and maybe, as the sun was setting, enjoying a good glass of wine, her life fading with the day.
Shortly afterward I visited my mother who was in a nursing home, pretty much detached from reality. Mostly she slept, but for brief moments she would awaken, sometimes quite alertly, and speak to herself or to someone who was there, usually while mentally in an earlier period of her life… just married, teaching school, being courted by my father, shopping with us small children, and so forth.
At such times I adhered to the Alzheimer Association’s excellent rule of recognizing earliest the reality she’s in, joining her there as quickly as possible, staying in there with her for only so long as she’s there, and leaving when she does. I might say that you can have some very interesting experiences that way.
At any rate, on the visit I’m talking about, this second event, she did awaken, clearly in a time when she was in her late teens; she had just returned from the “racecourse” in the city of her youth, quite animated and flushed from a great autumn day out in the company of her friends; they’d even won some money in the third race, thanks to a good tip from a kindly gentleman carefully reading his program; she asked what I was doing there and I said I was just passing through and I asked how they’d fared in the later races, and she said with a smile that they’d not done so well, losing most of their winnings in the 7th, and then she lapsed back, went quiet, and drifted off to sleep. And I left.
As it turned out, that was my last exchange with her, but I remember thinking as I drove home…she may well have just had what Sue had described as her ideal last day of life.
And that was how my idea of what constitutes a minimal “quality of life” changed. The truth is, I suspect, that it’s just not measureable from the outside.
