A Mother's Choice

In this essay for marie claire, writer Nikki Gemmell explores the topic of euthanasia and dealing with the devastation that came with losing the most important woman in her world.

- Nikki Gemmell

What to do if you are a woman who’s been celebrated for your beauty and vivacity your entire life – and those attributes are suddenly taken way from you? What to do if a localised pain in your foot, which has resulted from years of wearing fabulously fashionable shoes, eventually vines its way up through your body and into your leg and your groin, and then through your hip and lower back? Corrective surgery doesn’t fix the infuriating situation. The pain starts to curve your spine. Affect every corner of your life; your equilibrium, joy, serenity. The pain changes the set of your face, wearies it. Eventually has you withered around a walking stick, like an old crone in a fairytale.

This was my mother, Elayn Gemmell. My beautiful, audacious, stunning mother, who had never been that little old lady curved like a comma in a fairytale – until she was. She had always been the radiant princess everyone gravitated toward, the life of the party, the woman who pumped oxygen into the room. She was the former model in her designer clothes, always with her pop of glorious colour, with the wide, vivacious smile of Elizabeth Arden red.

But suddenly Elayn couldn’t maintain any of this any longer. The unrelenting pain meant dressing was becoming increasingly difficult. Reaching around her back to snap on a bra, agony; ditto, bending to put on underpants. Or lifting her arms for the meticulous, hour-long make-up ritual she had conducted every morning of her adult life. She did it all, somehow, through intense chronic pain – until she couldn’t.