My 86-year-old dad, Allan Yaffe, opted to kill himself during the second week of January last year rather than live one more week in a body he called “a bag of garbage.”

Last Friday’s B.C. Supreme Court ruling against the Criminal Code’s prohibition of physician-assisted suicide took me back to the circumstances of his relatively quick death.

For at least a year before Dad faced down the nothingness he anticipated in death, he’d toyed with the notion of calling it quits.

He’d been living rather unhappily for about four years in a Vancouver nursing home — “a warehouse for the dying,” he labelled it — and, wheelchair bound, began feeling tortured by his deteriorating physical condition.

Two years earlier, my mother, living at the same home, had died of pneumonia. A year earlier, Dad had gone blind. His hearing, too, was failing.

He had been on kidney dialysis three times weekly for some six years — a ritual he positively detested.

He had lately developed chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and had to be hooked up to oxygen.

He also had problems with both his bladder and rectum.

Meanwhile, poor circulation left his legs below the knee, including his feet, perpetually infected; rotting for all practical purposes and forcing him to face the prospect of amputation.

He told me repeatedly that his life no longer was worth living, that he didn’t want to have to keep coping with all the physical trauma being thrown his way, that he was prepared to go and it would be a relief.

The thing was, Dad always knew he had the power to order up his own death simply by curtailing his dialysis.

In that sense, the Criminal Code discriminates against those who must rely on a helping hand to reach the Pearly Gates.

Three and a half days into my father’s dialysis boycott — a briefer than anticipated period during which time morphine medication failed to fully diminish either his discomfort or acute awareness — Dad crossed to the other side in his brown leather La-Z-Boy.

Of course, I had no idea how to go about accompanying him on his final journey. I listened in those last days as he confided a few things about his life that I’d never known. I took him a takeout hotdog — his final food request, which he wound up not being able to get down.

In the year and a half since then, I’ve thought often, it was a mercy for him to pass on.

And it would be a similar mercy for other mentally aware folks who, like my Dad, face a life of abject suffering and want a similar release but require a doctor’s help.

Politicians dread dealing with such sensitive social issues that polarize the electorate. They know there will be little upside, in terms of popular appeal, for them in supporting the necessary Criminal Code change. But it’s the humane thing for Parliament to do.

The fact physician-assisted suicide has become available in Oregon and the Netherlands should provide a guide for the government in crafting the necessary safeguards to ensure any system of euthanasia is not abused, that mentally depressed individuals are not given free rein to just opt for suicide.

The Harper government has not yet determined whether it will appeal last Friday’s court ruling. Rather than waste time on such an appeal, Conservatives should get on with the task of easing the way for those, like my father, seeking to escape their untreatable suffering.

Barbara Yaffe is a columnist with the Vancouver Sun.

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