The psychological effect of involvement in euthanasia is substantial.
Physicians, trained in the fundamentals of promoting human wholeness and carrying out euthanasia according to patients’ wishes, are shocked, have a sense of powerlessness, and feelings of isolation.
Lay people can experience the same emotions.
EUTHANASIA
Your departure leaves a hole in the sandy beach of my life.
The hole gapes and threatens,
It might swallow me when I step into it.
I look for holes when I run barefoot in the surf, to avoid them.
My ears sift through the musical roar of waves, eroding the sandy beach of my life.
I returned you to the opalescent fog,
To the backdrop where the brown pelicans soar, in formation, soundless.
There is no sound gushing between you and I any more.
The silent memory is all I have.
I hoard this memory like precious gold.
The memory cannot be shared.
It too will erode, like the sandy beach of my life – where you left me at.
Poem by Liz Heidhues 7.26.2020
Drawing – Carla Sonheim
Photo – Great Highway Ocean Beach, San Francisco – Lee Heidhues
Lee's Perspective 