Dead Ends (15 page)

But their relationship was just beginning.

Katy—initially a nervous public speaker—decided to do a couple of presentations in local high schools to tell her story and encourage kids to think about responsibility and the risks of drunken parties and bad choices.

She showed pictures of Bob competing in triathlons, reading to the twins, goofing around with his friends, and talked about their lives.

And then Katy showed a photo of him lying on the table in the morgue.

It was powerful. But just a start.

In 2003, an article on restorative justice, on bringing offenders and victims together to help both heal, captured her imagination. After much preparation, Katy met with Ryan for five hours in the Matsqui federal penitentiary, showed him her presentation. They talked about Bob, the children, Ryan's family, and life behind bars. And as the time came to leave, she reached out to the man who killed her husband.

“I do not know what your plans are after you are released from prison, but if you would like to come and work with me in the schools, I would be honoured to work with you.”

Their first two presentations were inside prisons, but then Aldridge and Hutchison shared their stories together in schools and community groups.

“We cannot change the fact that our lives came crashing together on New Year's Eve in 1997,” she wrote in
Walking After Midnight
, her frank account of the experience. “Ryan and I came at this journey from opposite directions. We met somewhere in the middle and chose to walk forward side by side.”

“It is simply the best we can do.”

S
ue Rodriguez walked out of the doctor's office in August 1991 and knew everything in her life had changed.

She was forty-one, mother of a son just starting school. She had begun working as a legal secretary, was happily married, and had a home in the pastoral Saanich Peninsula outside Victoria.

And, Rodriguez had just learned, she was dying.

She had noticed numbness and weakness in her left hand in April, and been to several doctors seeking answers.

Now she knew. She had amyotrophic lateral sclerosis—Lou Gehrig's disease.

Rodriguez could expect to live two to three years after the onset of the disease—the time she first noticed the numbness in her hand.

As
ALS
progressed, nerve cells in her brain and spinal cord would die. They control all the muscles in the body. As the cells died, her muscles would weaken and atrophy.

People with
ALS
lose the ability to walk, or use their arms. The muscles of the head and neck waste away, so they can't speak, chew, or swallow. They must be fed, first by someone else, then, as swallowing becomes impossible, through a tube. They are at risk of respiratory infections and choking.

As their conditions worsen, people are likely to be paralyzed, unable to lift their heads. Machines keep them breathing through tubes. Caregivers, family or paid, empty catheters and clean bowel movements and try to prevent bedsores.

Death usually comes because patients choke to death on food, develop pneumonia, or suffocate when their muscles used in breathing no longer work.

And through it all, patients' brains are otherwise unaffected—they feel pain, are aware of their circumstances. The mind is a prisoner in a wasting body.

Rodriguez knew that was not for her.

She researched the disease, decided she would not die that way.

“I'm not afraid of death at all,” Rodriguez told Anne Mullins of the
Vancouver Sun
. “But I fear gasping for breath, panicking, being in a situation where I am hooked up to a respirator, unable to swallow, unable to move, unable to do anything for myself.”

“I hate to be entertaining the thought, but I will do what I have to do in order to die in as peaceful a manner as possible.”

The law, Rodriguez found, made dying peacefully, on her terms, extremely difficult. Suicide is legal in Canada. But helping someone else commit suicide is a criminal offence.

Rodriguez wanted as much time with her husband and young son as possible. By the time she decided to end her life, she would likely be physically unable to make it happen. She would need help.

She knew she couldn't ask her husband to help end her life when the time came. It would be too difficult emotionally. And he would be breaking the law. If he went to jail, who would care for their son?

So Rodriguez decided to do everything she could to change the law. If not in time for her, then for others.

It was a brave choice. Polls indicated most Canadians supported an individual's right to choose the time of his or her death and to be assisted by a doctor.

But powerful groups opposed any change, and politicians shied away from the issue.

Rodriguez went public with her illness, and her desire to end her life when she chose, in the way she chose.

She launched a legal challenge to the law barring assisted
suicide, arguing that it was discriminatory and violated her constitutional rights.

Other Canadians, she noted, had the legal right to end their lives. Because the progression of her illness meant she would be incapacitated, and assisted suicide was illegal, she did not.

While the challenge made its way through the courts, on an inevitable path to the Supreme Court of Canada, Rodriguez sacrificed her personal privacy to lobby for changes to the Criminal Code.

All the time, the clock was ticking.

Two months after she went public, Rodriguez urged a parliamentary committee to help change the law. She was already too sick to travel to Ottawa. Her powerful video presentation had to speak for her.

Rodriguez filmed the presentation in her family room, perched on a black leather couch, the sun dappling the treed garden outside her window. Her voice was already affected by the deterioration of her muscles—she spoke slowly, with little affect. She was gaunt, her dark hair cut short on the sides and swept back.

Her words, though, were powerful.

“My name is Sue Rodriguez. A year ago, when I was first diagnosed, I was quite agile. Today I can barely walk.

“I had full control of my hands except for some occasional twitching. Today, as you can see, my hands are misshapen and it is all I can do to sign my name in a scrawl.

“There's much worse to come… . Soon I will be unable to walk. I will be unable to breathe without a respirator. I will be unable to eat or swallow—unable to move without assistance.

“I want to ask you, gentlemen, if I cannot give consent to my own death, then whose body is this? Who owns my life?”

Compelling. But
MP
s did not want to touch the polarizing issue. Liberal
MP
John Nunziata even fought to keep the video from being seen by the committee, saying that if Rodriguez was too sick to appear, she should submit a written brief, though she was also unable to write by that point. An anti-assisted
suicide group linked changing the law to the death camps of Nazi Germany.

The politicians wouldn't act. Her only choice was the courts.

The British Columbia Supreme Court ruled against Rodriguez on December 29, saying assisted suicide was not a right protected under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

On March 8, 1993, the British Columbia Court of Appeal also ruled against Rodriguez, in a split decision. Two justices said that the rights of Rodriguez were not being affected, and that it was up to Parliament to decide if the law should be changed.

But Chief Justice Allan McEachern said Rodriguez's fundamental Charter rights were being violated, because they prevented a doctor from helping her end her life when suffering became unbearable.

That left the Supreme Court of Canada. But on September 30, the court rejected her bid to overturn the law in a 5-4 decision. The majority ruled there is no Charter right to assisted suicide, and that the law expressed society's rejection of suicide and fear of abuses if the law was changed.

The four dissenting justices said Rodriguez's rights were being violated. Other Canadians could legally choose when to end their lives. The law against assisted suicide denied her that right. And she was being made to suffer because of possible abuses that had nothing to do with her.

Rodriguez saw a glimmer of hope, at least for others.

“While I may not benefit from the decision today, I hope that Parliament will act and allow those who are in my situation to benefit in the future,” she whispered from her wheelchair. “It has been worth it, far more than I ever anticipated. People are talking about this and thinking about these issues.”

But she had never been counting on the courts. Seven months earlier, she had found a doctor—Dr. X—willing to help her end her suffering when she decided the time was right. In mid-January, she set a date. She could no longer hold her son, and did not want him to have to see her suffer and waste away.

On February 11, 1994, just under three years since her diagnosis, Sue Rodriguez had a last dinner with her husband,
Henry, and son, Cole. The next morning, they left the home for the day.

New Democrat
MP
Svend Robinson, a friend and an advocate for her right to die, arrived at her house that morning. Rodriguez had asked him to be with her. They talked, and she gave him a list of friends and family to call.

Dr. X arrived, willing to break the law to help Rodriguez decide when it was time to die.

“Sue remained serene and calm throughout and in total control,” Robinson said. “She faced her death with incredible courage and dignity. I held her in my arms. She peacefully lapsed into unconsciousness and stopped breathing approximately two hours later. The doctor then left.”

Robinson said he called a palliative-care physician shortly after Dr. X left, and soon after made calls to the
RCMP
and coroner's service.

An autopsy found she had died of overdoses of a sedative and morphine. The
RCMP
took a brief interest in trying to identify Dr. X, but there were no charges.

But Rodriguez's hope that her death would lead to a public debate about assisted suicide and changes to the law was misplaced. Twenty years after her death, the laws remain unchanged.

T
he west coast was a wild place in 1864, and not just because of the waves crashing on the rocky shores.

The gold rush was bringing another wave of newcomers into the colonies of Vancouver Island and British Columbia. Conflicts with Natives were increasing, with each side blaming the other for indignities and attacks. Traders from the colonies and the United States sailed up and down the coast, flouting the ban on selling alcohol to Natives imposed by Governor James Douglas six years earlier.

The Royal Navy, already with too few ships to patrol the coast, was on alert over warnings that Confederate forces in the American Civil War planned pirate-style raids on shipping and faced a simmering boundary dispute with the United States.

It was a tense time for the navy's Pacific Station commander, Rear Admiral Joseph Denman, who had earned a reputation for aggressive leadership in his battles against slavers in West Africa. (Denman Island, off Fanny Bay on Vancouver Island, is named for him.)

Land-based policing was scant and improvised. The Colony of Vancouver Island, created thirteen years earlier, had a police commissioner, but policing authority was delegated to local magistrates, most with no qualifications.

William Duncan was one of those magistrates. Duncan was an ambitious British missionary who had established a utopian Christian community with members of the Tsimshian First Nation two years earlier. Metlakahtla was about ten kilometres
from Prince Rupert and held up as a model; Duncan was a celebrity in the mission world.

His community plan included law and order, and Duncan had appointed ten Tsimshian men as police officers. When colonial officials reported suspicions that the fifteen-ton American sloop
Random
was illegally selling alcohol in coastal communities near Port Simpson, Duncan acted.

He authorized the arrest of the captain and seizure of the ship and cargo. On August 17, he dispatched five Native constables, by canoe, to seize the sloop.

It was a risky mission. The officers had to paddle toward Port Simpson, about thirty-five kilometres away, to find the
Random
.

Tensions were already running high between traders and Natives after a series of confrontations, some violent. Racism was a given; Natives were seen as savages. White sailors were not going to accept orders or take direction from Natives, even Native police officers.

The Tsimshian constables paddled through the day and into the night before they found the
Random
. The crew wouldn't let them board until dawn, but once they were aboard things seemed to go well. The crew agreed to sail to Metlakahtla to deal with the charges, and one of the constables set out to tell Duncan they were on their way.

But resentment—fuelled by consumption of the ship's cargo of whisky—set in as the day went on. An argument broke out, and the three-man American crew said they weren't going to Metlakahtla, but planned to flee the twenty-five kilometres to Russian territory (the current Alaska).

When the four remaining constables objected, the crew took up guns and started firing. It was chaos on the sloop. One constable was wounded in the hip, two others in their arms. They managed to scramble into a canoe and escape to Dundas Island.

But Cst. Reuben Onslow, a thirty-one-year-old member of the force, was fatally shot and disappeared into the Pacific. (His Aboriginal name was either Cowallah or Cowaltah. Both spellings appeared in records.)

When word reached Victoria days later, Denman sent
HMS
Grappler
to look for the Americans. But the thirty-two-metre gunboat, built for the Crimean War, had little chance of success. Under full steam, the journey from the naval base at Esquimalt to the scene of the crime took more than three days.