Debbie Ziegler Shares Her Daughter's Journey to End Her Life With Dignity, Ep. 30

Debbie Ziegler's daughter, Brittany Maynard at the age of 29 was diagnosed with a terminal brain tumor she chose to end her life. Her story was controversial and painful. Debbie shares her daughter's journey in life and how she ended hers.

Photo credit: Simon & Schuster

Contact

Debbie Ziegler website – Get a copy of her book, Wild and Precious Life

Note: A Life and Death Conversation is produced for the ear. The optimal experience will come from listening to it. We provide the transcript as a way to easily navigate to a particular section and for those who would like to follow along using the text. We strongly encourage you to listen to the audio which allows you to hear the full emotional impact of the show. A combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers generates transcripts which may contain errors. The corresponding audio should be checked before quoting in print.

Transcript

Dr. Bob: Well, Debbie, thank you. I can't tell you how much I appreciate you coming and spending time. We've had a number of conversations over, since we met, which was probably a year or two ago.

Debbie Ziegler: Yes.

Dr. Bob: I think each time we talk, we get a little bit deeper into the conversations, and I think we both are very aligned in what we're trying to do with our time here.

Debbie Ziegler: Absolutely.

Dr. Bob: Yeah. I would love to use this time for you to share a bit about Brittany so people can really know who Brittany was. I think a lot of people know the name, Brittany Maynard. It's become, in many areas, a household name, and I think certainly in California, and a lot of people think of her as groundbreaking, but they don't really know Brittany. Hopefully, after this, after people hear this, they'll get your book, and they'll learn a lot about Brittany and about her journey, but I'm hoping that you can share a bit about that, because I think it would be really valuable for people to understand who Brittany was, what she did, and then what you've been doing to carry on her legacy and honor her, so ...

Debbie Ziegler: Well, thank you for asking me to speak with you today. Brittany is remembered for the last act of her life, and those last minutes of her life are relived over and over again and spoken of over and over again. She knew they would be, and before she died, she asked me ... She said, "Mama, make sure people remember me for how I lived as much as they remember me for how I died." That is something that I try to honor her by doing, and one of the ways that I honored her was by writing a book about the way she lived, and I titled it Wild and Precious Life because Brittany did live a wild and precious life. She was very much in love with this world, and when she was terminally ill, she would say to me, "The world is so beautiful, Mom. It's just so beautiful, and I'm going to miss it so much."

She did not want to leave this earth. Nothing inside of her desired that, but the fact was that she was terminally ill, and she had a terrible and gigantic brain tumor that had been growing for over a decade. When I look back at Brittany's life, I try to focus on the brain and how marvelous and plastic it was to tolerate the growth of a tumor for 10 years and to, as that tumor slowly grew, her plastic, resilient brain transferred function. I try to remember that. Even when I first find out she was sick, she had already lived a miracle, and it's important to focus that. The miracle I wanted to happen, which, of course, was that she wouldn't die, didn't happen, but a miracle had already happened in that she had lived 10 years with the brain tumor growing.

Dr. Bob: What a beautiful awareness and a gift. It's so interesting because many people don't have that. Many people have a, are diagnosed relatively quickly after something that starts developing because it's created issues that can't be ignored or-

Debbie Ziegler: Yes.

Dr. Bob: ... their plasticity won't happen, and so everything changes from that moment on. Right? They're thrown into the health care system and start having procedures and treatments, and so ... You know that this is a fatal illness, even when it's caught early.

Debbie Ziegler: Yes. I think that one thing that Brittany and I talked about quite frequently is that every person's disease is different, and it annoyed Brittany that people felt that just because their uncle, cousin, niece, had had a brain tumor, that they somehow knew her journey. The same thing happens to, I think, cancer patients with any kind of cancer. We have to remember, as we interface and speak with and try to love these people through their illness, that every body's illness is different.

Just as our bodies are different, our cancer is different. It can be very, very frustrating for a patient to be told, "Oh, w...