Sophia Zhao

It’s been over ten years since nana was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. 

The long stretch of time made it easier for everyone else to come to terms with her illness. It also made keeping track of other moments hard: the first time she stopped uttering complete sentences, forgot her way around the neighborhood, or started needing someone watching over her 24/7. 

There’s an old Chinese saying that goes, “there’s no piety in the face of a long sickness.” I don’t know if there’s enough love in the world to care in that way, every hour, every day, until death puts a perfect period to a quotidian epic.  

For the first three years, finding a remedy was a family undertaking. Something seemingly promising would come up every other week: a new hospital, an imported drug, a specialist in another city. At some point in the endless cycle of hope and frustration, it became too demoralizing to keep searching. She gradually faded into a topic that appears seldom-regularly during my weekly phone call with my parents: 

“How’s nana doing?” 

“Her knees have got a little worse.” 

“What did the doctor say?” 

“Just her bones getting thinner. It’s part of aging.”

“Alright then. ” 

“We are thinking about sending her to a nursing home.” 

“What did grandpa say?” 

“He got angry when we brought it up, but your aunt found a nice one in the suburb and they’re taking him to see it tomorrow.”

It’s the same kind of conversation parents have about sending a toddler to kindergarten. She has all sorts of decisions made for her now: what to eat, when to eat, when to walk, when to sleep, when to have her body washed, when to have her diaper changed. And there she was, three weeks after the idea was first brought up, sitting in a wheelchair in the middle of a room — reeking of degeneration alongside eight other indistinguishable men and women. 

I visited nana for the first time this summer. It’s not hard to see what they mean by “nice” about this place: the decently new furniture, the wall with the calming shade of yellow, the huge window looking out into the garden to supply the perfect amount of stimulation. But despite the cleanliness of the room and the nurse who has nana’s condition word for word, something felt wrong about being in that room as a visitor. 

There is a sense of hurtfulness in the act of looking. It’s the same feeling you get from going to one of those landscape immersion zoos. You see a perfectly-sized rainforest sitting in between a tundra and a desert and for a moment you let yourself be taken away by this spectacle of nature until you spot an Asian elephant standing in the middle of a patch of grassland and it hits you: there’s a snowfield not far beyond the fence and a world of audience gazing at its every move. Yet it doesn’t know that — you feel like you’re harming something just by looking. A nursing home is not so different — except instead of nature, it’s the dying that’s on display. 

Mom didn’t say a thing on the drive back, when we commented on the friendly staff, the nice view of the activity room, the customized schedule they planned out for nana. I supposed it was more difficult for her than for me. It always is. 

The last conversation I had with nana was eight years ago, before all her words had dissolved into gibberish and before speech was completely lost to her. A part of me had already bid farewell to her somewhere along the way, as her memory gradually unwove itself into broken strands of obscurities. The same idea must have occurred to mom — the unspoken and somewhat guilty ceremony of declaring nana gone to ourselves. 

I wondered what the exact moment was when she stopped feeling like someone’s daughter. In retrospect perhaps it happened that night. Lying next to me, in the room nana used to live in before she was sent to the nursing home, she turned to me and said, “I want you to put me through euthanasia if I ever become like that.”

I might have said something in response, but nothing would have sounded right then. Nothing sounds right, even now. 

I wished she could have stayed a daughter a little longer. 

 Being a daughter feels like a choice sometimes. It’s an identity you can take off at the end of a day and put on again the next morning. Even more so when you are a teenager, going to a boarding school five hours of flight away from home. Being a daughter means calling your parents once a week and going home two or three times every year. 

Being a mother, on the other hand, or my mom being the mother she is, is a full-time job. I asked her once.  If her life feels easier now that she no longer has to take care of me. She said, “I think about you all the time. Even more so now that you’re thousands of kilometers away.”

I started researching into euthanasia after that night. It’s legalized in nine countries as of today. The most common form of voluntary euthanasia is taking or having a drug injected. In Switzerland, where the law permits foreigners to seek euthanasia, they even coined the term “suicide tourism” for people who come all the way here to end their life. 

I remember reading about it on the news two years ago, when Jean-Luc Godard decided to end his life at the age of 91. Something about that didn’t sit right with me. Maybe I was expecting more — more of the gravity of life from the man who had his characters die in the most unexpected and dramatic ways: shot in the street or fell out of a window or painted their face blue before blowing themselves up. 

I remember reading that a family friend of Godard commented: “He was not sick; he was simply exhausted.” Godard made his first feature film “Breathless” in 1960. It has always been about the relentless movement, entangled conflicts and unending desires. Exhaustion has always been there. He was not simply exhausted.  He was exhausted to the point of not being able to stand his own life anymore, and modern medicine offered him a neat, easy way out. 

That’s what terrifies me about euthanasia — the amount of control we extend over death, the peace and ease we think ourselves capable of imposing on it. It’s like shutting down a machine with the press of a button. It’s like having the option of sending someone to a nursing home when caring for them becomes too taxing, as if they were a corporate job to be outsourced. It shouldn’t have been so easy. 

 Mom’s most common comment over the years: “I am worried about you. Your head is too much in the clouds.” 

 I think she’s right about that. I think about what will happen to nana in three years. I think about how much more of herself she could possibly lose. I think about Alzheimer’s and euthanasia and the countless ways one commits themselves to death. I think about my mom and whether she is serious about what she says, though it might never even become a problem — or at least not for another thirty years. 

Thirty years. That is the distance between the ground and the clouds. And yet, sometimes, that paralyzing problem waiting thirty years down the line feels like the only thing that matters.