Dying with dignity?

Every day dozens of people die in Sacramento. Some go easily, others slowly and painfully. Our cover feature this week, “Killing Mom,” is about one of those deaths.

Her name was—still is, her family would say—Elisabeth Katharina Hosseini. She was a German immigrant married to an Iranian immigrant, and she had three sons. One of them is Raheem F. Hosseini, this newspaper’s associate editor.

It’s never easy to write about the death of a loved one, and it’s especially difficult when that death was made unnecessarily painful by bureaucratic incompetence and legal obstacles. Raheem worked on his story for months following his mother’s death, wrestling with memories that were sometimes wrenching.

Elisabeth Hosseini wanted desperately to take advantage of California’s aid-in-dying law. She’d used holistic methods of her own choosing to fight multiple myeloma, a blood cancer, for more than 22 years. When death finally approached, she wanted to keep control. “I don’t want to suffer,” she told family members.

However, as Raheem’s story reveals in several vivid and disturbing scenes with hospital officials, hospice workers and physicians, the aid-in-dying law’s principle purpose isn’t so much to allow dying people to exit painlessly and with dignity, but rather to protect the doctors and medical bureaucrats who implement the law.

This is an important story. It shows in graphic detail how a well-intentioned law can end up being onerous to those whom it was meant to assist. More than that, though, it’s a vividly drawn portrait of a remarkable woman and her family as they faced one of life’s most challenging events with courage and love.