When Dying Wishes Cause Pain to the Living

(Publishing pieces I had only put on Medium, but it’s good stuff, so I’m publishing them here now)

When a dying wish conflicts with the needs of the living, which should take priority? Some cases are easier than others. A friend told me of a terminally ill woman who felt so worried about leaving her dog behind that she made her daughter promise to have the dog euthanized after she died. The daughter promised, but after her mother was gone, she made the decision to find the dog another home instead. Should the daughter live with the guilt of having disobeyed her mother’s dying wish? Many people would probaby say no.

But where’s the cutoff point? Several years ago near the end of her life, my mother developed terrible health and my father became her caretaker. Her strength was failing, but she didn’t want anyone to know, even her own daughters. She swore my dad to secrecy and only changed her mind when she received a prognosis of having a few months to live.

At that point, my mother let me and my sister know she was dying, but she didn’t want anyone in our extended family to know. Considering that my parents came from large families, this meant keeping my mother’s illness from a lot of people, including at least one person who cared very much for my mother and would have flown out immediately if she had known what was happening. In fact, this was someone who had been close to my mother their whole lives, but with whom my mother had been angry and had stopped speaking. The chance to make amends with my mother would have been priceless to this person.

It hurt to keep my mother’s secret. I wanted so much to tell that family member that my mother was on the way out and these were her last weeks to make peace with her. I thought about telling her and considered how angry it would make my mother. That didn’t feel like such a high price. My mother had been angry with me for years and we’d had almost no relationship for the final seven years of her life. I felt like I could face my mother dying angry with me.

If someone had presented me with a hypothetical of this problem before I faced it myself, I would have said, “The daughter should absolutely tell that family member the mother is dying. If it’s someone who’s very close and she’d be devastated by this death, then yes the daughter should disobey her mother.”

But what I would not have anticipated was how it would feel to consider the other surviving family members. My father had kept the secret of my mother’s poor health for over a year. My sister was keeping the secret of my mother’s prognosis. I valued my relationships with them. How could I break the confidence they were keeping? What if they never forgave me? What if I permanently damaged my ties to the only immediate family I would have left?

As little as I wanted to, I kept my mother’s secret because I didn’t want to risk hurting my relationships with my father and my sister. However I felt about what my mother was doing by not telling anyone she was dying, I felt afraid of my father and sister changing how they felt about me if I contacted that family member.

The day after my mother died, our extended family received the news. I imagined the family member in question bearing the storm of emotions it must have caused to know that my mother wanted to hurt her like that. I emailed her and told her how sorry I was that I hadn’t told her my mother was dying. I explained the situation and how bad I felt. She was understanding. She knew who we were dealing with.

Did I make the right decision? An easier question is: did I make the decision most people would have made? I think I probably did because most of us make decisions based on how our lives are affected, regardless of what the right thing to do is. I actually don’t believe a person’s desires are more important then everyone else’s just because they’re dying. What kind of world would we have if the worst behaviors were allowed because the person is about to die? Oh, wait. That is the kind of world we have.

Years later (my mother died in 2013), I still regret being part of my mother’s vindictiveness. If a dying person’s last wish will hurt someone, I believe it’s the prerogative of others to disobey it. But I failed to live by that conviction and that happened because I didn’t want anything to do with my mother at that point. I spent that spring emotionally detached from her and everything that happened around her death. I wish I hadn’t detached. I wish I’d acted like a family member and pushed back against my mother’s order. I have to live with the memory that I didn’t.

This isn’t a story with a clear life lesson. It isn’t even a story with a clear opinion. I speak as someone who disappointed herself. Even though I want to say, “Don’t do what I did,” I know how hard it is to maintain principles in the face of death. I also want to say “Focus on the relationships that really matter,” but figuring out which those are can be baffling. Whether it’s right or wrong, when a person is on the way out, their words and desires weigh more than those of people who aren’t dying. Maybe all we can do is take it easy on ourselves for whatever decisions seem best at the moment.

24 Jan 2023

First published on Medium.

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