My mom died last year at 95, after ten years of falling deeper into dementia, and if I’m honest, I have to admit there were times during that period when I wished she would die.
Seeing her decline was heartbreaking. First she lost her sight, then her mobility, then her mind. Yet, often when I called and asked her how she was, she would say, “Oh, I’m fine.”
Except that time she answered, “Well, there’s a bear in my living room.”
“What’s the bear doing?” I asked.
“Sorting through the mail.”
I miss her, but I was missing her long before she died. She had become a shadow of the vibrant woman she had been. Some days she was more lucid than others, she still had her appetite, she still knew who we were more often than not, but she was not going to get better. We wished we could spare her the worst.
I don’t remember when or how I came up with the idea of a writing a novel about assisted suicide, but I’m not surprised I did. The novel was clearly informed and inspired my mother’s and our family’s experience. It’s dedicated to my mom and my four siblings.
When I Killed My Father is fiction. All made up. Our family — my mother’s five children and our spouses — communicated well and handled our real-life challenges with a minimum of conflict. It would not have made for a compelling story.
In my book, there’s a lot of conflict.
Psychologist Lamar Rose’s father has cancer and dementia, and wants his son to kill him and end his suffering. Lamar refuses, but his father keeps asking, and he relents. Then, at his father’s memorial, his sister accuses him of murder from the pulpit of the church.
What Lamar does on his own, leaving his sister out, is wrong in all kinds of ways. But it is what his father wanted. Lamar is caught between what is compassionate and what is legal. I’ve always been attracted to moral dilemmas, especially gray areas where the difference between the right thing to do and the wrong thing are not so clear. Like family. Like relationships. Like dying.
I’m a big fan of John LeCarre, whose dozens of cold-war thrillers and other espionage novels explore that moral muddiness. Like if and when do ends justify the means.
In the past ten years, I’ve written two other novels, where I explored a world that I was exposed to, but was hardly an expert. My first novel — Bones in the Wash: Politics is Tough. Family is Tougher — is a political thriller set during the 2008 presidential campaign in New Mexico. My second, Wasted, is a “green noir” mystery set in the garbage and recycling universe in Berkeley.
As a journalist, I enjoy learning enough about places and issues and movements to be able to write about them with credibility. So I learned about memory care units and advanced care directives and the rapidly growing end of life movement in the same ways I learned about political campaigns and recycling — reading and talking to people.
I was surprised to find out how large the end-of-life movement has become. Even though my mother had a caregiver for ten years, was treated for cancer and a brain tumor, spent many a week in the hospital, and lived in a memory care unit for the last year and a half of her life, I barely knew this end-of-life movement existed until I was deep into researching and writing the book.
During that process, I talked to a lot of people who had personal or professional experience with end of life, and was moved by their stories. (You can see some of my interviews and stories at johnbyrnebarry.com/end-of-life.)
I wrote When I Killed My Father because I wanted to entertain readers, but also because I wanted to encourage more conversation about the all-too-often taboo subject of death. To borrow a headline I saw recently, I wanted to promote the “most important conversation no one wants to have.”
One of the unexpected rewards of writing this book is talking with people in the end of life movement, and I found, perhaps not surprisingly, that they all seemed to be happy, vibrant, grateful people. In one way or another, they all affirmed that awareness and acceptance of our impending death can help us live a more fulfilling life.
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On October 26 in Berkeley and November 2 in Mill Valley, I am thrilled to be hosting two events as part of Reimagine End of Life SF, a week exploring big questions about life and death. My event, “Why I Wrote an Assisted Suicide Family Thriller,” will be one part author reading and one part conversation about end-of-life concerns — family decisions, dementia, dying, and more.
You can read the first three chapters of the book here.
If you like the book, or even if you don’t, I’d love to hear from you. Contact me at johnbyrnebarry@gmail.com.
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