Washington Post: My terminally ill mother wanted to end her own life. What would it take to fulfill her last wish?

Tim Zimmermann writes about his mother's assisted death in Washington DC, the great difficulty they had in filling the prescription, and her determination to die on her own terms:

On a Sunday evening in July 2018, my 81-year-old mother raised a small red glass to her lips. In it was a mixture of water, grape juice and 10,000 milligrams of Seconal powder, a massively fatal dose of a barbiturate most commonly used for insomnia. She was sitting up in a hospital bed in her Washington, D.C., home, bathed in warm early evening light and wearing a thin white nightgown. She had spent the weekend calling close friends and loved ones to say goodbye, and chatting and passing time with me, my sister and all her grandchildren....According to the D.C. Department of Health, my mother was one of two D.C. residents to kill herself last year using the 2016 Death With Dignity Act. (A third, Mary Klein, the law’s most vocal citizen-advocate, also took her own life but for some reason does not show up in the department’s statistics.) The law, which allows terminally ill patients to end their lives with a fatal dose of drugs prescribed by a doctor, puts Washington at the leading edge of humane end-of-life options: Only nine states plus the District — and just a handful of countries — allow medical aid in dying.... As she approached her 80s she had already decided that, when the time came, whatever illness or decrepitude she might confront, she wanted to be master of her fate....There was no way she was going to let a disease dictate her fate, or try to hang on day after day while it slowly consumed her. “I want to be remembered as ‘Teeny full of life,’ not ‘Teeny the cancer patient,’ ” she told my sister Quinny.