“Won’t eternity be a bit long?” What am I going to do with all this time? » A few days before her death, scheduled for July 2022, Ghislaine Lemay, 86, feared the calm to come. In her pretty house in Quebec City, the world had begun to vibrate around her: her daughters were busy making sure that the medical kit for the three injections required to dispense assisted dying arrived on time, her grandsons arranged his room so that at the appointed time the whole family might find their place there, his oldest friends crowded around his bed to share a last drink and their memories. Finally, her great-grandchildren covered her with drawings, wishing her a “have a good trip to paradise”. “Despite her questions, my mother never flinched or panicked, remembers, a few months following his death, his daughter Geneviève Gagné, 62, who welcomed him into her home for twenty years. When she found out she was allowed to leave, she even became euphoric. »
Suffering from rheumatoid arthritis since she was 46, an incurable autoimmune disease that confined her to a wheelchair, this former administrative assistant at the Bell telephone operator, hair the color of snow, full of joie de vivre but suffering martyrdom, long ago demanded the right to end it. He had to wait for Quebec to authorize euthanasia in 2015, for the law to evolve and for the criteria for ” end of life ” or of « reasonably foreseeable natural death” be removed, in 2020, so that she can hope to see her wish granted – “You don’t die of polyarthritis”opposed to him until then the doctors.
“I have the feeling that I am in a stronger helping relationship than what I have been able to do in all the rest of my career as an emergency physician. » Natalie Le Sage, doctor
After two strokes, osteoporosis which increased her pain and days spent undergoing examinations in hospitals without hope of remission, she judged, in the summer of 2022, that the time had come. “She took the time to make sure we were all comfortable with her decision”, says Geneviève Gagné, language reviser for the Quebec government, between tears and smiles as she leafs through a photo album of her missing mother. “She made her granddaughter’s husband, who is a sailor, promise to scatter her ashes in the St. Lawrence River. July 31, it was a Sunday, we all accompanied her, in prayers for her sisters, in song for us, with The sea, of Charles Trénet, whom she loved so much. »
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