Woman Chose to Die on Her Own Terms

On a night one year ago, Colleen Rice put her ever-present oxygen tank aside and played cards with her grandchildren, laughing with them. She went to bed and slept soundly.

She awoke before dawn and gathered her husband, two adult children and friends around her. She kissed them and told them that she loved them.

As they softly spoke words of poetry and prayer she had chosen, the 67-year-old cancer patient drank a glass of lethal drugs dissolved in water.

Within minutes, Rice slipped into a coma and stopped breathing, quietly becoming one of more than 90 Oregon residents to use the state’s Death with Dignity law since voters approved it in 1997.

Rice’s daughter, Catherine Paul, had to force herself to stay in the room. She supported her mother’s decision, she said, but it was hard to watch her end her life.

Oregon is the only state in the nation that lets physicians help to hasten the deaths of terminally ill patients.

The assisted-suicide law is at the center of a battle of wills between the Bush administration and Oregon.

Last month, U. S. Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft said the federal government would withdraw licenses of doctors who prescribed federally controlled drugs to patients who want to use them to die.

Dr. William Petty of Physicians for Compassionate Care, a group of doctors and others against the law, said helping patients die runs counter to medical ethics.

“Federally controlled substances should not be used to kill people,” he said. Instead, he said, physicians and patients should focus on end-of-life care and pain management.

Other critics have said Oregon’s law could lead to terminally ill people choosing to hasten their deaths to spare their relatives the costs of months of expensive medical care.

But the state of Oregon insists that terminally ill patients should have the right to decide the circumstances and time of their deaths. Most Oregon residents agree. The law has been approved by a majority of voters twice.

Oregon and the law’s supporters are fighting for it in court. On Nov. 20, a federal judge issued an injunction keeping the law in effect for up to five months while attorneys prepare arguments.

Behind all the legal wrangling and ideological posturing, Colleen Rice’s family members say they don’t want the human story to be forgotten.

It was hard for some of Rice’s relatives to accept her decision to take her life. They didn’t want to lose her any earlier than they had to, but they accepted her choice to die on her own terms.

“Nobody forced anyone to do anything. It was her decision,” Catherine Paul said.

In September 2000, Colleen Rice thought that she had worsening asthma.

She was about to visit relatives in Canada when she said, “I just don’t have the strength to get on the plane,” recalled Scott Rice, her husband of 25 years.

Her doctor ordered a CAT scan. Hours later, she learned that she had advanced lung cancer.

“One day we’re thinking of Christmases to come and, within hours, that’s it,” Catherine Paul said. “I just collapsed. I couldn’t believe it.”

The tumor in Rice’s lung was inoperable. It was leaking fluid, making breathing nearly impossible. Rice loved to laugh, but laughing caused pain not even morphine could dull.

About a month after the diagnosis, Scott and Colleen Rice met with a lung specialist who told them, “If you have anything to finish, do it now.”

There were many projects to complete. Colleen Rice had always been an active woman--a writer, an actress, a businesswoman.

The family raced to edit a book she’d been writing--a historical novel titled “In the Midst of Darkness.” The first copies rolled off the press two weeks after she died. She had planned ahead, signing labels to go inside for people who might want an autographed copy.

“She became very focused,” Scott Rice said. “She thought, I have some strength and I know there are things I need to do.”

One of those things was planning her own death.

Although the family supported the assisted-suicide law, they never thought that they would use it. But the choice was obvious to Rice.

“Years ago, before any of this happened, she would say, ‘I don’t want to suffer,’ ” Scott Rice said. “She had a fear of drowning. . . . You know, with lung cancer, it’s going to be something very close to that.”

Rice charted every step of her death, almost down to the minute. She chose the day, Dec. 13--after her grandson came home from the Navy, but before Christmas. She didn’t want to die on Christmas.

Her relatives did their best to be cheery. They admit that it was sometimes difficult.

“I was thinking how hard it was for us, trying to look happy, playing cards with the kids. As hard as it was for us, I can’t imagine how hard it was for her. She knew she’d never see them again,” Paul said. “She never cried once. It came together the way she wanted it to.”

The clarity and thoroughness of Oregon’s physician-assisted law helped Rice’s relatives accept her decision to use it.

Before the lethal dose of drugs is supplied to a terminally ill patient, two doctors must agree that the patient has less than six months to live, has voluntarily chosen to die and is capable of making health care decisions.

“That was so helpful for me . . . just to know, have some reassurance in it. That you do have second opinions, that you know she isn’t doing it because she’s depressed, that there is lots of help for the pain,” Scott Rice said.

Colleen Rice consulted with clerics from a variety of religions after hearing her diagnosis.

“Her feeling was, it’s between her and God, and it was nobody else’s business,” Paul said.

During one of her visits to the doctor, she learned the U. S. Senate was debating a measure that, like Ashcroft’s order, would have made it illegal for doctors to prescribe medicines to help people die.

Scott Rice and Catherine Paul say they have become vocal advocates of the law because that’s what Colleen would have wanted.

“If her ghost could show up, she’d be carrying a sign up on the Hill in Washington saying, ‘How dare you?’ ” Paul said. “My mother was a fighter. She’d be fighting for it.”