Ingrid Andersson.
Our 6-year-old hen has started crowing daily at 6 a.m. The sound is more like a croak than a crow. Even so, it sounds to me like a kind of joy: It’s a good day to be alive!
Having just flown back from Sweden, my body thinks it’s afternoon. I get up and make coffee. Outside the kitchen window, honey bees and goldfinches are at work in the lavender hyssop. The hens in their run scratch and flap their wings.
It’s a good day to be alive. These are the words with which my father’s daily calls to me often began. When my dad still was able to go for walks in his neighborhood, he’d brake his walker every block or two, sit down on the built-in seat and look around. With his laboring heart, cancer-eaten bones, and an expression of love on his gaunt face, he would soak up every detail, name every bird (he was a veteran birder), and offer a positive comment to anyone passing by. For my dad, quality of life with terminal illness meant getting up in the morning (even after mind-racing nights of little or no sleep) and feeling that it was a good day to be alive.
My father taught me that the only person who can measure the quality of a life is the person living it.
About a year before my dad died and several years into repeated and increasingly traumatic hospitalizations, he asked me to find him “pills.” He wasn’t talking about his Warfarin. He was saying to me: When my time comes, medically assisted death is my method of choice. He was saying: I want to die the same way that I have lived. A decades-long supporter of body autonomy, as well as a longtime member of the Madison Optimist Club and a Las Vegas gambler who more often than not beat the house, my dad knew the difference between long odds and prolonged death. He knew when to walk away from the table.
Thirteen states and nine European countries have legalized medically assisted death for people with terminal illness. Wisconsin isn’t one of them. This is in spite of repeated efforts by families and legislators here to pass a compassionate right-to-die act. My state senator tells me that the “Our Care, Our Options” Act has not yet been reintroduced in 2026 but is expected to be.
It’s modeled on a law that’s been in practice for almost 30 years in the state of Oregon, without a single substantiated instance of abuse. The Death With Dignity Act, as it’s called in Oregon, allows terminally ill, mentally capable adults with a prognosis of six months or less the option to request, obtain and take lethal medication in the time, place and company of their choosing.
The right to die peacefully on his own terms was what Dad was telling me he was looking for. But he didn’t have the will or stamina to make a cross-country trip to a different state. So, two months before he died, he walked into a gun shop, verbally confirmed that he was neither angry nor depressed, signed a form, handed over $500 and walked out with a snub-nose revolver.
What kind of society makes access to guns easier than access to a peaceful and lovingly supported end of life? The cruelty and injustice of it made me want to howl.
I asked my Swedish cousin, a retired journalist covering cultural affairs, what people with terminal conditions do in Sweden, where guns are very difficult to get. “They go to Switzerland,” she said. She knew somebody who’d done this. In contrast to my family’s experience, that person’s friends and family members were able to share last moments with their beloved, laugh and cry together, hold each other through one of life’s most memorable and profound experiences. Right-to-die advocacy in Sweden is led in part by Björn Alveus, the same Björn who comprises one of the “Bs” in ABBA. Alveus has studied systems around the world and champions one in particular: Oregon’s.
My dad’s exit was quiet and quick at home. He harmed no other person or property and left a note of intent for the police. There was less blood than I’m used to cleaning up after birth, in my work as a nurse-midwife. But he could not include his family in his timing. His family could not be by his side for support or sit with his body and make goodbyes after death. Prompt criminal investigation was required by law, and anyone suspected of aiding in his death could have faced prosecution.
The investigation after my father’s death felt more violent than the death itself. A dozen or more boots on the ground were followed by the sheriff, followed by the medical examiner, followed by the medical photographer amid overlapping and repetitive questions from strangers in hospice and law enforcement. It all culminated in my father’s death certificates arriving in the mail, bearing in capital letters the jarring conclusion: SUICIDE.
“We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.” Toni Morrison spoke these words in her Nobel Prize acceptance speech in Stockholm, 1993. The degree to which we can “do” truer language around the universal yet deeply individual life transition of death is the degree to which we’ll succeed in creating more loving and just options for dying people and their families.
About the time he bought the gun, my dad’s language changed. I no longer heard him say, “It’s a good day to be alive.” Gazing out from the front of his last card to me (he was a prolific writer of notes and cards) is a bluebird, and lingering inside, in my dad’s quivering hand, his final favorite phrase: “Life goes on.”
Ingrid Andersson is a home birth nurse midwife and writer in Madison.
