San Diego Woman Writes About Sister's Choice to End Life Under CA's Aid-In-Dying Law

SAN DIEGO, CA — Freelance journalist Kelly Davis, of San Diego, usually writes about criminal justice and social issues. This week, however, she wrote about the life-ending decision of someone very dear to her: her sister, Betsy Davis.

In 2013, the 41-year-old Ojai resident was diagnosed with ALS — sometimes called Lou Gehrig's disease — a progressive neurodegenerative disease that affects nerve cells in the brain and the spinal cord.

"It’s a cruel disease that slowly robs a person of the ability to move, speak, eat and, eventually, breathe," Kelly wrote in a commentary published by Voice of San Diego. "There is no treatment, let alone a cure, and there likely won’t be for several years.

"Early on, she knew she’d rather take her own life than succumb to a disease that kills most of its patients through suffocation. Some ALS patients use ventilators and feeding tubes to prolong their lives, but that’s not what my sister wanted. Over the last year, I watched her increasingly struggle to eat and speak and do the simple things the rest of us take for granted, like scratch an itch or brush a stray hair from her eyes. No longer able to walk, she spent most of the day in bed."

Kelly said her sister, an artist, came to her about a year ago and asked her if she knew anything about Bitcoin, a virtual currency used to purchase items over the Internet.

"It took me awhile to realize why she was asking: She wanted to buy a lethal amount of drugs and she didn’t want the purchase to be traceable," Kelly wrote on Voice of San Diego.

In October 2015, not long after her sister asked her about Bitcoin, California Gov. Jerry Brown signed the End of Life Option Act, making the state the fifth in the nation to have such a law. The legislation took effect June 9, permitting terminally ill adult patients with capacity to make medical decisions to be prescribed an aid-in-dying medication.

So in early July, Betsy emailed party invitations to close friends and family, inviting them to a two-day celebration at her home July 23-24 — at the close of which she would end her life. According to Kelly, Betsy's one rule was "no crying." More than 30 people were in attendance. They ate, drank, played music and took photos, and each person was asked to take one of Betsy's belongings as a souvenir.

At 6:45 p.m. on Sunday, July 24, Betsy drank a combination of morphine, pentobarbital and chloral hydrate — masked by coconut milk, sugar and a little salt, according to Kelly — and slipped into a coma on a makeshift bed under a white canopy on a hillside. A few hours later, she passed away as the sun went down.

"My sister is an example of exactly what the law intended to do: allow a dying young woman the ability to assert control over the chaos and uncertainty of terminal illness," Kelly wrote. "She turned death into a reason to celebrate, and she was there to enjoy the party."

Asked how she is doing with her only sister gone (it was just the two of them and their father after their mother died from breast cancer in 1996), Kelly said, "I miss her all the time."

"She was very funny and even though she wasn't able to talk on the phone, we'd send each other silly texts," Kelly told Patch. "Though we'd disagree, like siblings often do, she understood me probably better than anyone. But, it was equally painful for me to be going about my life and knowing she was suffering. She was very outgoing and loved to travel and meet new people, so knowing she was stuck in a bed all day was very difficult to think about."