Table 7 Coping
Coping | End of Life | Hastened Death |
|---|---|---|
Problem focused | Solving logistical problems, learning new skills, keeping household running, arranging help, focusing on patient wishes, serving as gatekeeper [26, 30, 33,34,35,36, 38, 39, 45, 48, 46, 50, 51, 53,54,55,56,57,58, 65] | Planning and conducting logistics such as physician appointments or filling prescriptions, planning events before, during and after death, finding solutions for protracted or complicated dying [15, 16, 68, 70] |
…caregivers offered practical support to assist patients with ingesting, such as getting juice or alcohol to chase the medication if the patient requested it, holding a cup, or keeping an eye on the time. Timekeeping was an important component of the process because patients were typically advised to ingest the medication quickly so as to avoid losing consciousness before finishing the lethal dose. (Buchbinder et al. 2018, p4) | ||
“So I remember us sitting down and then dividing the tasks, like, father doing the shopping, and my sister would do this, and I’d do that....” (Strang & Koop, p.110) | ||
Emotion focused | Caregiving as an opportunity to show love, be rewarded with closeness; frustration, sadness, or anticipatory grieving [27, 32, 33, 36, 37, 42, 44, 45, 47, 51, 54,55,56,57,58, 60, 61, 63] | Overall focus on fulfilling patient’s desire to avoid prolonged suffering; where hastened death was illegal or quasi-legal, moral distress in trying to reconcile patients’ request for support with own ambivalence or discomfort. In Switzerland, carrying the burden of secrecy after death [16, 19, 20]. |
“So you know it was just a sadness that we couldn’t use the time to talk, to really, that I couldn’t help her prepare for her death.” (Sinding, p.158) | ||
“My brother was used to say: “you do not have to be selfish, you do not have to think only for yourselves… if I want to do this thing is because I do not have solutions and I can’t bear it anymore.” Ehm…he was saying that we were selfish because we wanted to keep him alive… at all costs. Even in these conditions… so inhumane.” (Gamondi 2015, p149) |