Print

Email story

Comment

Email editor

An exit of her choosing: unafraid and in control

By LUCY MORGAN, Times senior correspondent
Published March 10, 2007

TALLAHASSEE - Adelaide R. Snyder liked being in control.

So it should come as no surprise that she controlled her own departure from this earth.

During the early morning hours Monday, Adelaide died asleep in her own bed beside her daughter, lawyer Florence Snyder Rivas.

In the final days she had a leaky heart valve - the pig valve put in place by doctors years ago. It could not be fixed, so she knew her days were numbered. And that was before she developed pneumonia.

She rejected the antibiotics her doctors offered, saying she did not want to treat the condition that was making it harder and harder for her to breathe and talk. She did accept oxygen, but she wanted nothing that would prolong the agony.

I visited with Adelaide Saturday, little more than a day before she left us. She was up, answering e-mails on her computer and quite clear about her decision. She was 84 and had a good life, much of it spent as a college administrator. Her husband, Joe, died April 9, 2006, after a lengthy illness.

She believed deeply in the right to die with dignity. She spent her final weeks making a trip to South Florida to visit old friends, attending a Super Bowl party and a small gathering for Christine Jennings, the Sarasota Democrat who appears to have lost a race for the U.S. House of Representatives because of another round of problems with the way we run our elections.

She was involved in reading and listening to the political world around her until the final hours. She wanted me to predict who was going to win the 2008 presidential race as we visited Saturday afternoon. You had to believe her biggest regret at leaving us was the possibility that she would miss a good political showdown.

I watched my own mother die a crumb at a time over a decade. She didn't want to go that way, but there was little we could do to control it once she was in the hands of the medical establishment.

Adelaide was particularly horrified by the Terri Schiavo story and wrote eloquently about the need to let her go.

Adelaide was so in control she wrote a letter to be published after death, again reciting her opposition to spending billions on "hail Mary passes" designed to prolong the lives of octogenarians when little children lack basic health care in many places. She wanted to go sooner, rather than later.

Her closing sentence was: "Support the First Amendment. It is all that stands between us and dictatorship."

At the end she offered to write a blog on dying for the Tallahassee newspaper.

"She's not afraid to die, but she is afraid of being bored," her daughter, Florence, noted.

She didn't live long enough to do the blog, and that's our loss.

"There is a time to die," she wrote in 1999 in a column defending the rights of individuals to make these decisions.

"Someday it will be my time to walk through the door to the next stage of existence," she wrote. "On that day, under conditions that I have made abundantly clear, I hope that neither the state of Florida nor its functionaries, nor my family, nor my doctors, will deny me that privilege. If they do, I will be back on my broomstick to haunt them for a long, long time to come."

You might say she left at the top of her game. And that's the way she wanted it.

[Last modified March 10, 2007, 02:10:54]