A Suicide That Became a Best Seller : Author Helped Her Mother’s ‘Last Wish’ Come True

“Last Wish” (Linden Press/Simon & Schuster: $14.95) is Betty Rollin’s best-selling account of how she helped her terminally ill mother commit suicide in October of 1983. And it’s also the story of an incredibly complex mother-daughter relationship--a “love story,” Rollin likes to emphasize.

And frankly, claims the former ABC news correspondent, she’s absolutely astonished by the success of “Last Wish.” “I never dreamed this would be a commercial book,” the 49-year-old writer said, sitting on the edge of a chair in her suite at the Beverly Wilshire. “So it means something.”

‘Confused, Frightened’

Rollin is uncertain about just what that might be, but “I think it means people are confused and frightened by this issue. In addition to what may be happening with one’s parents, I think you wonder yourself: ‘Am I going to be one of those people who die in their sleep at 99? Or am I going to be like Ida Rollin?’ ”

Ida Rollin, outgoing, fiercely attentive mother of Betty Rollin, was in her early 70s when she developed ovarian cancer. After surgery, she underwent chemotherapy. By the fourth treatment, she was bald, perpetually nauseated, weak and in unrelenting pain.

Perhaps equally significant, her personality had undergone a drastic transformation. Once the cheerful mother who showered family, friends and strangers with advice, she became like a “child,” her daughter wrote: “docile, obedient, especially with her doctors, and most especially in the hospital.”

Mrs. Rollin recovered from chemotherapy and was well for a year. When the tumor began to grow again, further chemotherapy proved futile. She was slowly and painfully dying. Doctors told her it could take a few months, perhaps as long as a year. Bedridden and confined to her apartment, unable to keep down food or control her bowels, Ida Rollin began telling her daughter she wanted to die, making allusions to suicide. “I’ve got to end this,” she would say. “Why can’t I take a pill?” she would implore.

Analyzing the Options

So, as she wrote, Betty Rollin and her husband Harold Edwards complied--carefully analyzing the options (arsenic, cyanide, a gun), discreetly approaching physicians about drugs and effective dosages. Since it is illegal to dispense advice about suicide, doctors were persistently uncooperative.

Finally, a sympathetic doctor in Amsterdam supplied not only the information about pills that Betty Rollin wanted, but advice on how to orchestrate an irreproachable death. Rollin should stay with her mother until Mrs. Rollin fell asleep, then leave, making sure the doorman saw her. Someone else should find the body and call Ida Rollin’s doctor. “If there’s suspicion of a suicide,” he warned her, “there’ll be an investigation. You don’t want that.”

On the afternoon of Oct. 17, 1983, Betty Rollin got her hair done, then went to her mother’s Manhattan apartment. A while later, her husband joined her. Earlier that week, Ida Rollin had obtained from her doctor a prescription for sleeping pills. Now, sitting up in bed, her daughter and son-in-law on either side of her, she swallowed a Compazine and 20 100-milligram pills of Nembutal, washing them down with club soda. She died later that night.

Betty Rollin’s version of her mother’s life, her 2 1/2-year battle with cancer and her death is drawn solely from her own memory of the events. She did not take notes or keep a journal during her mother’s illness as she normally would have for a story, she explained, because “first of all, I was emotionally in a state. Secondly, I was afraid to write anything down, and I never expected that I would.”

Emotional Potency

When it came to remembering verbatim hundreds of conversations with doctors, relatives and friends, Rollin said she had “no problem. Actually--and this has happened to me before on other books--I kind of put myself back in the scene emotionally, and the dialogue came back,” she said. “As soon as I remembered one line of dialogue, I remembered the next, then the next. You have to realize, too, that what I’m remembering was very emotionally potent.”

Yet, in disclosing what is an emotionally charged and one-sided account of her mother’s death, Rollin has placed herself in a curious legal and ethical position--that of her own principal defender. A review in the Washington Post has already suggested the possibility that her book is a confession of murder. Apart from that, assisting in a suicide is a criminal offense under several New York State laws, though rarely prosecuted.

But Rollin has yet to hear from Manhattan Dist. Atty. Robert Morgenthau, who would decide whether to prosecute the case. “You know as much as I know,” she said. “Nothing’s happening.”

Calm and Professional

And if she’s concerned about that prospect, she doesn’t let on. She’s calm, poised, professional. Dressed in a black linen suit, her short, thick black hair perfectly coiffed, she speaks in a quiet, even voice that is notable for its lack of affect.

Rollin does not believe that she committed a crime. “There’s no case here,” she said. “Unlike the Gilbert situation (a widely publicized case in which Roswell Gilbert, a 76-year-old Florida man, was convicted last May of murdering his terminally ill wife), this was not a ‘mercy killing.’ This was not a killing.”

Before writing “Last Wish,” Rollin said, she consulted a criminal lawyer about the legal risks of revealing her story. The lawyer told her that since her mother killed herself, without any “direct help” from Rollin, she should go ahead with the book. “My mother was determined,” she said. And if Rollin had not gathered the information for her mother, “no one can prove that she wouldn’t have done it. There is no evidence of any kind that I pressured her, which is against the law, or that I encouraged her, which I certainly did not.”

Asked whether anyone has suggested that her motives were confused, that perhaps she did it more for her own sake than her mother’s, Rollin seems incredulous. “Certainly, no one reading the book would think that. Even people hearing about it. Nobody has suggested that to my face.”

Public Gratitude

On the contrary. To her own surprise, she said, few seem to be shocked at all that her mother took her own life and that Rollin assisted her. “Ninety-nine percent of what I’m getting--and this is based on letters, people running up to me in surprise, and radio call-in shows--is thank you,” she claims. And “what I’m not hearing is ‘your mother’s terrible.’ ”

Rollin offers a number of explanations as to why she complied with her mother’s request--including her belief that individuals should have control over whether they live or die, that the medical system is wholly inadequate in helping hopelessly ill patients, that legal measures should be taken to deal with the problem.

“People sometimes live longer than they want to live,” she said. “Some people want to live no matter what. I think we should make this legally clear, either through a living will, power of attorney or a relative, so that should we become comatose, our wishes were still respected and granted. And certainly in a case where a person is conscious and wants to die with some reasonableness.”

‘She Got Her Wish’

But the reason Rollin most frequently gives for her decision is that she did it for her mother. “My mother had a wish and she got her wish,” she said. “For me not to be there for her would have been cruel. It would have been denying her what she said she wanted.”

In the end, said Rollin, her own ambivalence--emotional, not ethical--was insignificant. “It didn’t matter what I thought or felt.

“I think our relationship had everything to do with what happened,” she said. “I felt very good about our relationship, particularly because when I was growing up, it was full of conflict and anger. Then somewhere along the way, it got very good.”

In “Last Wish,” Rollin depicts a doting Jewish mother who played a dominating role in her life. In a revealing passage about her mother’s expectations, Rollin wrote: “I had to be smart, but, just as important, I had to look nice. My mother drilled me in fractions and at the same time used a curling iron on my hair. She criticized me, indiscriminately, and flattered me just as indiscriminately. She encouraged me to think my own thoughts and be independent, but not of her.”

Such was the extent of Ida Rollin’s devotion that when Betty Rollin went off to Sarah Lawrence College, her mother promptly followed--moving into a house three blocks away.

“Inevitably,” Rollin wrote, she rebelled. She brought home “odd” friends, including a disagreeable girl named Lorna with orange hair, a facial tic and green lacquered fingernails. In response, her mother suggested that the real intension of this friendship was to upset her.

Greenwich Village

The daughter then moved to Greenwich Village, had an affair with an actor and did what “all neurotic New York Jewish girls do who love/hate their mothers. I got psychoanalyzed.” In the meantime, she stopped seeing her mother. “She, the steady date of my childhood--I wanted nothing to do with her.”

Then “one day I realized I loved her,” Rollin wrote. “I caught myself calling her on the telephone, because, of all things, I felt like it.” Then, in 1975, after surgery to have a cancerous breast removed, Rollin remembers waking in the hospital to see her mother by her bed. “I knew I not only loved her but needed her.” From that point on, the “years of warring” were over.

So what drove Betty Rollin to write about this intensely private--not to mention potentially illegal--experience after her professed apprehension?

She did it, she said, because she feels “proud” of the way her mother died and felt almost “obliged” to tell her story. “She suffered with that chemotherapy and she went through a lot, but she died as she lived--in control.” And her mother was so “strong in her death. I’ve never seen such determination, bravery and grace. And, I have to say, ability. When she wanted to make something work, she made it work.”

She also did it because she feels her mother would have “wanted me to write this book. I know my mother would have been proud of this book.”

With Utter Candor

And she did it because she has come to believe that her style of utter candor is valuable to others in her situation. “I had a very good experience doing that the first time,” she said, referring to “First, You Cry,” her earlier book about her battle with breast cancer. “I heard from a lot of people. When you tell about a personal experience in a truthful way, you reach people in a very good way.”

Ultimately, Betty Rollin felt she owed more to her mother and all those readers than she did to herself or her husband; any concept of privacy vanished in the face of that conviction. “When something happens under my nose, either to me, or in this case to my mother, I think there’s a purpose in telling. How could I not tell it?”

For Rollin, the purpose in part is to say: “Look at this woman, what she did; what do you think about it? To get people thinking about the possibility of rational suicide.”

And the fact that she’s making money from her mother’s suicide does not stain Betty Rollin’s conscience. “I feel better about this than anything in my whole professional life,” she said. “I feel very good about that money. I feel that I earned it. I worked on this book for more than a year and it was extremely difficult and painful to write.

“In a way,” she mused, “it’s a strange question. As if money is somehow dirty, that money should come from something you don’t have any feelings about.”

In the meantime, Betty Rollin is uncertain what’s next. She may return to television. She definitely won’t found any kind of organization for families of terminally ill people--”not my thing,” she said.

Eventually, there will be a movie based on the book. Goldie Hawn optioned the screen rights “months ago,” Rollin said.

And as Rollin sees it, “My mother’s story is really a story of death as a triumph, as a victory. There’s no tragedy here.”