My husband, John, was lying there, frail but perfectly lucid, with our priest at his side, ready to administer the last rites. Doctors had discovered in him an aggressive form of cancer that had, by that time, spread throughout his body. The priest had communion bread in his hand, and a chalice of wine was sitting on John’s bedside table. There was a kind of quiet, holy stillness in the room. Then a young doctor walked in, looked at the chart, looked at John, looked at me, and delivered this line as though he were reading from a script: “I am required by law to offer you MAID.”
I had heard of MAID—medical assistance in dying—once or twice before, but now I was facing it up close. A doctor offered it to John within minutes of his arrival at the hospital, 10 days prior. He had declined it then, and he declined it again, just as calmly: “No, thank you.”
Our priest said nothing, though his brow furrowed slightly. He turned to the work he had come to do: He anointed my husband, said his prayers, and gave him the last rites. John died 48 hours later.
In my home country of Canada, MAID has grown rapidly since it was legalized in 2016; it represented 4.7 percent of all Canadian deaths in 2023, which translates to about 15,340 lives ended through assisted suicide. After my husband died, I began to see MAID everywhere I looked. A couple of friends in their 80s told me they’d been offered it during hospital visits. In the local newspaper obituaries, I began to spot euphemisms like “died by her own choice.” We all know what that means now.
Still, I thought John’s passing would be my last personal brush with MAID. I was wrong.
One morning, nearly a year later, I woke up with an excruciating pain in my lower back. It came completely out of the blue. I hadn’t fallen in the night. I hadn’t done anything strange. One moment I was asleep, the next I was wide awake, crying out. My daughter, who was living with me at the time, came running in from the next room and, when she saw how much I was suffering, picked up the phone and called an ambulance.
The paramedics took one look at me and agreed the pain warranted a trip to Vancouver General Hospital. Moments after they wheeled me into the emergency ward, a young female doctor approached my bed. After running through the usual questions about what was hurting and how much, she said, as casually as one might offer a cup of tea: “Do you want MAID?”
She sounded eerily like the doctor who had offered it to my husband—as if she was reading from a script.
I said, as firmly as I could manage: “No, thank you.”
She heard my refusal, took one look at my daughter’s and sister’s faces, and swiftly changed the subject. The polite, distinctly Canadian tone of the exchange made the situation seem all the more absurd.
I was stunned. No one had even told me what was wrong with me. All I knew was that I was in tremendous pain and that a stranger had just suggested I might want to end my life.
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I didn’t know yet that I had fractured the tiny bone at the base of my spine—the sacrum—which can’t be operated on and must be allowed to mend on its own. After my eventual diagnosis, I was transferred to the University of British Columbia’s hospital, where I rested for three weeks while the bone healed. But as I lay there waiting for answers, I thought of my husband and that line, “required by law.” I later found out doctors in Canada are not required by the Criminal Code to offer MAID, but the College of Physicians and Surgeons of British Columbia—which sets rules for physicians in the province—expects them to raise it as a legally available option for eligible patients. Given the advanced stage of my husband’s cancer, I understood their reasoning.
What’s disturbing is this was not my only personal brush with MAID since his death. Just months after John passed, an older cousin of mine, a retired nurse in her 80s, had voluntarily ended her life. I think, with all her medical experience, she knew she wasn’t getting better. Her body was disintegrating. She was in a nursing home, with no immediate family members. I could see how MAID was appealing to her, but as I lay in my hospital bed having been offered the same thing, I struggled to fully understand. I kept coming back to the same question: Why are we so quick now to ask people if they’d like to die, before we’ve even finished trying to help them live?
I had brushed up against my cousin’s fate—being shuffled, politely and efficiently, off the stage. But being offered MAID changed something in me. Before, I had assumed that in my 80s I would simply slow down: read my books, watch some television, enjoy time with friends, maybe travel a little if the opportunity arose. But death had been presented to me as a choice, and in a strange way, it made me take that choice seriously. No, I didn’t want to die, thank you very much. I had things to do, friends to see, places to go. I wanted to travel the world.
No sooner had I unpacked my bags from my hospital stay than I repacked them for my first adventure. My daughter and I were headed to Cuba; we have friends in Havana, who are always happy to see us. But this trip felt different. I felt like I was being welcomed back into the land of the living.
My daughter found a little music group in Havana, a kind of informal workshop, and signed us up. She took percussion; I took the piano. I had been a piano teacher for many years, but Cuban music is another world entirely.
The young musicians running the workshop gathered us around and began to explain what makes Cuban music Cuban. It isn’t just the instruments or the melodies; it’s the rhythm. In Western music, we like everything squarely on the beat. In much Cuban music, they hesitate on the third beat in a bar of four. That tiny pause, that little delay, is what makes your shoulders start to sway without you realizing it. It’s that syncopation, that melodic wink, that makes Cuban rhythm so contagious.
My daughter stood there with a maraca in her hands, following the pattern, while I sat at the piano trying to unlearn a lifetime of proper, on‑the‑beat playing. When I finally caught it, the whole room lit up.
It’s funny to think that not so long ago, a doctor stood over my hospital bed and offered me a way out. It scares me to think what might have happened. In another version of events, perhaps I would have been alone, or more frightened, or more exhausted. Perhaps I would have paused to consider it.
I have a strong Christian faith, and I am not afraid of dying. As lovely as living on Earth is, I know I am going to a better place when my time comes. Every night, I pray the following: “God, you know when you’re going to meet me. I am not going to rush. I will come when you say so.”
But so many of my fellow Canadians are taking the decision into their own hands. They’re not all elderly. Young people are choosing euthanasia, too, and to them I would say the following: Think very, very carefully about what you’re giving up. When you’re feeling down, life can feel small, but the world is way bigger than you can imagine. The path that you’re currently walking on, which has brought you to this point, is not the right path. Seek a new path, and you might be surprised to find that there really is more to life than you thought.
This weekend, ahead of Easter, my daughter and son‑in‑law are hosting a gathering where Cuban music will fill their little home. One Cuban friend will bring his guitar, another will sing and play percussion, and I will be on the piano. I’ve been practicing a famous song called Lágrimas Negras—“Black Tears”—trying my best to remember that sly hesitation on the third beat that gives it that swing.
In a strange way, having death offered to me made me want to lean into living. Life is a choice, after all. And I will keep choosing it, offbeat and joyful as it is, for as long as I possibly can.
—As told to Josh Code
This essay was adapted from the author’s video testimony for Amanda Achtman’s Dying to Meet You, a project to “prevent euthanasia and encourage hope.”
This has been Ancient Wisdom, our series in which writers over 70 tell us how they are aging gracefully. Last week, Joyce Moreno, 78, the great Brazilian singer and songwriter, recalled being a musician during Brazil’s years of dictatorship.
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