A few years back I had the best dog one could hope to have. When she was 14 years old, fairly aged for a dog, she developed rectal cancer that would not kill her quickly but that made her miserable. I am a veterinarian and I chose to “put her to sleep.” I dislike that euphemism, but it’s what clients expect. None has ever brought in their beloved pet and asked me to “kill it.” In fact, pet owners often avoid any direct reference to death. Pets, as do people I suppose, don’t die, they “pass on,” “pass away,” or are “lost.”

Death is a scary thing, so it’s no wonder we try to work our way around it, even in our speaking. In December, my mother was diagnosed with cholangeocarcinoma, a cancer of the bile duct. She had always been incredibly healthy, so it was a shock, to be sure. Her first doctor said she could die within two weeks. Mom cried, said she wasn’t ready to die and admitted to being frightened by the unknown.

Mom lived three months, and in that time she faced her fear and she told me a few weeks before she died that she no longer dreaded death. She wondered about it, she spent some time questioning her beliefs, but in the end she was content with her life and was ready to be rid of the illness associated with her cancer. She was calm and dry-eyed when she told me.

Mom was fortunate in the rapidity with which she went from normal to the brink of dying. There was not a lot of misery in the cancer’s progression. Twice she developed sepsis from a blockage caused by the tumor and twice we rushed her to the hospital to have both the blockage and the infection treated. The second episode began with seizure-like activity from which she never recovered. Her tumor was bleeding, her blood pressure was dangerously low, and there was no hope, short of the miracle Dad still counted on.

As I often do in matters of my family’s health, I asked myself what I would do if Mom were a dog – dog medicine being what I know. Dogs and people are really not all that different medically, and the scene was not all that different from what one might see in one of the more sophisticated veterinary hospitals.

All that day, Mom drifted in and out of awareness. When awake, she pitifully begged to have all the medical paraphernalia removed and the IV lines and multiple tubes into her body pulled. She wanted to get up; she wanted to go home; she wanted it all to stop. She mumbled, “Steve, help me,” over and over.

I wanted it to stop, too. I had told the doctors that I was a veterinarian, and that if she was a dog, I’d have put her to sleep. They understood, but there were constraints. She was not a dog. We couldn’t euthanize her.

We had tough decisions to make, but the bottom line was that Mom was not going to get better, no matter how much more we tortured her failing body with antibiotics, surgeries and more tubes. So we began the process to ease her out of life since we couldn’t just end it the way we would for a good old dog. We had to let her fail, bit by bit.

Thirty-six hours after being admitted to hospice, she could no longer drink and she seemed unconscious. She hadn’t eaten in three days. Morphine kept the discomfort away; at least that’s what we kept telling ourselves, but it would not end the bodily functions that told us she still had life. She was of tough stock. Her mother died a few days short of 100 years. Mom was not quite 80 and her body thought that it had a lot more years ahead.

Mom came to look like a mummy due to dehydration and starvation. Her body struggled for every breath, but her heart remained strong and steady. She persisted for 13 days after modern medicine had finished with her. I was beside her when she finally quit breathing. Her ordeal was over; mine continues. If I had treated a dog the way we treated my mother those 13 days, I would have lost my license to practice veterinary medicine and I would have been arrested for animal cruelty.