Rawnie Dunn is lying in her bed, propped in an upright position. The room is silent save for the faint audible voices coming out of her neck pillow speaker connected to the TV next to her. The curtains in her small room are drawn closed. Only a sliver of sun cuts across her body, casting a dull light on the wall behind her, with its framed memories and past accomplishments.
To her left sits Dunn’s part-time care nurse, who is one of the few people that can understand and translate her severe speech impediment.
The quiet scene in the Burnaby care home she now lives in is similar to the one the 62-year-old experienced more than a year ago – when she tried to kill herself. A few weeks after her 61st birthday, she overdosed on a mixture of gabapentin and quinine.
“I decided to take an overdose of pills,” she said. “I wasn’t depressed. I thought of it for many decades. I knew for decades. I knew my ending time of this disability was really dismal. On my 61st birthday, I realized that something had happened and realized I was at the end of the last phase.”
Dunn was born with Friederich’s ataxia, a 65 per cent hearing loss, aggressive scoliosis, carbohydrate intolerance and heart problems. By the age of 30, she was in a wheelchair and wearing two hearing aids.
At the end of November 2012, she finally followed through on a decision she had made a long time ago to end her struggle.The decision to end her own life, on her own terms, was unsuccessful. She woke up in a hospital bed after being resuscitated – against her written wishes.
“I didn’t know I had to have a (doctor’s) signed form, so I didn’t really have one. And when I realized it, I was really angry,” she said.
The suicide attempt took such a toll on her body that she went from being wheelchair-bound with some mobility to being paralyzed from the neck down, blind and sensitive to light, almost completely deaf and with a severe speech impediment.
“I feel like I’m in prison,” she said. “I want to die. There are people like me who want to die and shouldn’t be forced to live like this.”
Despite being legally blind, Dunn’s eyes are bright and look aware, which her mind very much is. Although her speech is laboured, she chooses her words carefully to try to explain her story – and why she’s fighting for the right to die.
“When my sons grew up and had families of their own, I chose to leave as peacefully as possible and asked my GP for a DNR (Do Not Resuscitate) order, wrote a will and published my long short story Emerald Wings: A Canadian Lullaby, to introduce myself to my wonderful grandchildren,” she said.
Dunn’s mind has not deteriorated despite her physical condition. In her younger days she was a member of MENSA – an organization for people with high IQs – and sat on and was an active member of the Council of Canadians with Disabilities.
Ataxia is a degenerative neurological disease that progresses over time. Respiratory complications, cardiac issues and severe swallowing problems can be the result – it is a complex disease that has no cure.
Dunn is paralyzed, but it has not saved her from experiencing extreme pain. She is given 12 doses of hydromorphine every day. Her pension is the highest possible one she can get, at $1,050 a month – but with all her bills she is left with very little afterwards.
This past fall was a tumultuous time for assisted-suicide advocates, as the B.C. Court of Appeal overturned last year’s B.C. Supreme Court ruling that a ban on assisted suicide violates the rights of the gravely ill.
In late October, the B.C. Civil Liberties Association took the fight for physician-assisted suicide back to the Supreme Court of Canada.
Although Dunn has not been able to find a lawyer who will take her case, as she lacks the necessary funds, she has the support of her family.
Dunn’s mother, Lynn Baur Hyde, says she’s had a difficult time watching her daughter’s struggle. She supports Dunn’s right to choose when and how she dies but said she could never pull the plug on her daughter herself.
“She keeps asking me to kill her,” Hyde said. “I just don’t want to do it myself.”
Hyde lives in White Rock, is in her 80s and visits her daughter several times a week. She says watching her daughter writhe in pain is indescribable.
“She was screaming at me one day, at the attendants there. She was in such pain, and in a garbled voice I know what she was saying, ‘Kill me, kill me.’ I said, ‘I don’t know how.’ She said, ‘Get a gun, get a gun.’”
It wasn’t the first time Dunn’s mother was in a difficult and overwhelming situation. Hyde walked in on her daughter the night she overdosed.
“There were pills everywhere on the floor, she couldn’t do anything about it,” Hyde recalls. “And she said, ‘Mom, would you just sweep up, make me comfortable and then leave?’
“And you know what? I went out in the car and shut the doors and screamed my head off. This is absolutely true. Then a voice got through the screaming. A calm, loving voice reassured me, ‘You have to know everything, you have to understand everything.’ And that helps me when I really get down. Life is really something.”
Dunn has two sons and three granddaughters. One of her sons, Tavis Dunn, lives in Burnaby and visits his mother several times a week. When he was a child, he remembers his mother having to constantly fight to keep her children. His parents separated when he was young, and his father moved back to Saskatchewan.
“Government care workers assumed she was slow or mentally disabled,” he said. “She constantly had to fight to keep us. They didn’t understand, they didn’t think she was mentally able to take care of us.”
Now that Tavis is a father with a 10-month-old daughter, he has a new appreciation for his disabled mother who raised two kids.
“She single-handedly raised two really rambunctious boys. We destroyed everything in the house, and she had to manage that,” he said. “I couldn’t imagine raising a child like that, and on the other side having people think you’re not good enough and try to take your child away.”
Tavis, like his grandmother, supports Dunn’s decision to end her life. He said his mother has been preparing him and his brother for this moment almost his whole life. Some forms of ataxia can take a person’s life when they’re in their 30s.
“It’s the perfect example of someone who really, genuinely, doesn’t want to be on this planet anymore, in an enormous amount of pain. We don’t have it set up in our legal system, the choice for someone to be able to do that,” Tavis said.
While the contentious issue of physician-assisted suicide has been making headlines, the idea that someone has the right to choose their own fate is a strong belief held firmly by Tavis.
“It’s different when there’s someone being pressured, someone wants them to go. That’s a real issue,” he said. “There’s got to be a middle ground, I don’t see why we need to keep her here just to satisfy our own moral statutes.”
Tavis said he does realize the scope of people’s concerns and the potential for disabled people to feel pressure to end their lives prematurely.
“I totally understand that people are concerned about making disabled people feel, or have their families make them feel like they’re not welcome or they’re a huge burden,” he said. “In my mom’s case, I totally support her. I know where her brain is. I strongly believe if you have a family member in this type of pain, it’s hard to see someone you love so much in that kind of pain. And the only solution is to have more drugs? All we do is drug her up with hydromorphine. It’s just drugging you out. That’s existing?”
According to the federal government, it is. The government has made it clear that it would challenge any provincial ruling to legalize assisted suicide, and strike it down.
Robert Gordon is a professor of criminology and associate dean of arts and social sciences at Simon Fraser University and a distinguished fellow of the Canadian Centre for Elder Law at the University of British Columbia.
Gordon has been keeping track of assisted suicide cases before the courts and says it’s hard to predict what the Supreme Court of Canada decision will be on the matter.
Assisted suicide is still part of the criminal code because suicide started out there, Gordon says. It was put there as a way to give people assistance in the health-care system if they survived their attempt.
“As the law changed, the concerns were expressed about people getting into suicide pacts and similar kinds of arrangements, and the decision was made,” he told the NOW. “It was decided that while it wouldn’t be a crime to commit suicide or attempt to commit suicide itself, anybody who helped you in either of those things should be subject to criminal prosecution.”
It was a mechanism to deter people from ending their lives, he added.
In order to legalize assisted suicide, it would be best for the federal government to set out provisions, rather than have each province tackle the issue separately.
It’s up to the policy makers in Ottawa to develop significant provisions and outline an underlying rationale for legalizing assisted suicide, which is the standard practice when a government undertakes a review, Gordon said.
“You might get some of the marginal opponents on board if their concerns are met, which usually have to do with safeguards,” he said. “In particular, people represented with the interest of folks with an intellectual disability, physical disability, those people are rightly concerned for the well-being of their constituency. They can be convinced if there are significant barriers of having assisted suicide.”
Such barriers could include setting up a process that ensures the person does not suffer from a mental illness and is “ absolutely dead certain” they want to end their life, he added.
In 2011, the Royal Society of Canada, which was established in 1882 and is made up of distinguished scholars, artists and scientists, published a report on the issue.
End-of-Life Decision Making was a report that commissioned national and international experts to tackle the issue and trigger informed debate in Canada.
Sheila McLean is emeritus professor of law and ethics in medicine with the University of Glasgow. She sat on the panel that guided the society’s report.
“It seems unfortunate that the Royal Society of Canada’s report does not appear to have led to law reform, although some recent case laws in other Canadian states seems to move the debate forward,” she said in an email interview.
When asked why she thinks European countries have moved forward with legalizing assisted suicide – such as Switzerland, and euthanasia in the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg – as opposed to Canada, there wasn’t a clear answer.
“Those European countries that have changed their law remain a minority, even within Europe, and certainly Canada is more in line with the rest of the world than are these countries,” she said. “It is sometimes suggested that the Netherlands was able to pioneer this issue because of the trust placed by Dutch people in their doctors, but this is not clear.”
McLean disagrees with Gordon and says involving the courts to move forward with legalizing assisted suicide is worth it.
“This is an issue that greatly concerns many people – both those in favour and against legalization,” she said. “It touches very clearly on the question of individual rights and their relationship to the public interest.”
McLean said the public can benefit from the experience of countries that have changed their legal approach, which will serve to inform the debate.
“In the U.K., getting anything done requires a brave politician, or politicians, to propose law reform,” she said. “I imagine the same is true in Canada, so lobbying politicians, as well as publicizing cases, seems the best way forward.”
The best way forward, according to Dunn, is to have the public hear her story. She said she’s written many letters to various media outlets in hopes of moving the issue forward.
“I want other people to really think about why people like me are kept alive,” she told the NOW. “They’re suffering emotionally. I want them to think about why; to think about it logically – not emotionally – as to why they’re kept alive. There are so many entangled emotions in there. It’s not fair. The other reason is for myself. I want to stop this.
“I can’t say much more.”
Key decisions
The Criminal Code of Canada states in section 241 that: “Every one who (a) counsels a person to commit suicide, or (b) aids or abets a person to commit suicide, whether suicide ensues or not, is guilty of an indictable offence and liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding 14 years.”
-Suicide was considered a criminal offence in Canada until 1972, which is when it was removed from the criminal code.
-Sept. 30, 1993: Supreme Court of Canada upheld the assisted-suicide ban in the now-famous Sue Rodriguez case. Rodriguez was 42 at the time, and she was suffering from the debilitating terminal illness ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis). She wanted to have a physician aid her in terminating her life peacefully. The judges voted 5-4 against her. On Feb. 12, 1994, an anonymous physician helped Rodriguez end her life.
-April 2011: B.C. Civil Liberties Association files a lawsuit to challenge the assisted-suicide ban in the B.C. Supreme Court, calling it unconstitutional as it denies an individual control over their choices.
- November 2011: Royal Society of Canada published its End-of-Life Decision Making report. It had a panel of six Canadian and international experts from various fields that compiled information to fuel the debate and provide material for those discussions.
-June 29, 2011: Gloria Taylor, who suffered from Lou Gehrig’s disease, joined the B.C. Civil Liberties Association’s other plaintiffs in the “death with dignity” lawsuit.
-June 15, 2012: B.C. Supreme Court struck down the ban on assisted suicide. Justice Lynn Smith suspended her ruling for one year to afford Parliament time to draft new legislation incorporating her ruling. The case involved Gloria Taylor and the B.C. Civil Liberties Association. Taylor died from a severe infection of her perforated colon on Oct. 4, 2012.
- Oct. 25, 2012: The Conservative federal government filed a 54-page argument stating that the current legislation was meant to protect the vulnerable and that “the inherent value of all human life should not be depreciated by allowing one person to take another’s life.” It also said the B.C. Supreme Court should not try to attempt to override the Supreme Court of Canada’s 1993 ruling.
- Dec. 10, 2012: B.C. Supreme Court of Appeal announced it would hold a hearing for the June 2012 ruling from Justice Smith.
- Oct. 10, 2013: In a split decision, the B.C. Court of Appeal upheld the ban on assisted suicide, reversing the June 2012 ruling by B.C. Supreme Court Justice Lynn Smith.
- Oct. 11, 2013: Environics Institute released results from a survey of 1,002 Canadians that 68 per cent of those polled supported physician-assisted suicide of the seriously or incurably ill but mentally competent.
- Oct. 29, 2013: B.C. Civil Liberties Association announced that it filed for a Supreme Court of Canada hearing to appeal the Oct. 10 decision. Elayne Shapray, a woman suffering from multiple sclerosis, has stepped forward in the case to challenge the criminalization of assisted suicide.
- Now: Quebec National Assembly is preparing to pass a provincial law that will legalize medical euthanasia.
