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SEATTLE (AP) – The day he chose to die, Robert Fuller partyed during his lifetime.
In the morning, he dressed in a blue Hawaiian shirt and married his partner sitting on a couch in their senior's apartment. He then took the elevator on three floors to go to the common room of the building, decorated with balloons and flowers.
With the help of a richly carved cane, he has been hanging out to greet dozens of supporters and friends of every decade, church parishioners and volunteers social sector. One beautiful spring day, the crowd spread in a sunny courtyard.
A gospel choir sang. A violinist and soprano played "Ave Maria". A Seattle poet recited an original work imagining Fuller as a tree with birds perched in his thoughts.
And when the time came, "Uncle Bob" hit his cane on the ceiling to attract attention.
"I'll leave you in a little over an hour," he announced.
A sob burst. Fuller turned his head sympathetically towards his source.
"I'm ready to go," he says. "I am tired."
Later in the afternoon, Fuller plunged two syringes filled with a light brown liquid – a deadly mix of drugs mixed with Kahlua, her favorite alcohol – in a feeding tube of her abdomen. He was one of more than 1,200 people who used Washington's law with the Death with Dignity Act to end their lives in the ten years since its adoption.
In this photo of May 3, 2019, Robert Fuller examines the vial containing the drugs that will end his days a week later, while he is advised in a drug preparation pharmacy in Seattle. The day he chose to die, Fuller had the party of his life. Later in the afternoon, he plunged two syringes filled with a lethal drug cocktail into a feeding tube located in his abdomen. He is one of about 1,200 people who used Washington's law with the Death with Dignity Act to end their lives in the ten years since it was adopted. (AP Photo / Elaine Thompson)
As these laws become more popular – they took or will come into effect in Hawaii, New Jersey and Maine this year, making it nine states where "help to death" is allowed – more and terminally ill people have the option to hasten their deaths. Those who do so cite various reasons – fear of losing their autonomy or dignity, becoming a burden to their loved ones, becoming unable to enjoy life – but they are united in the desire to take charge of their own goals.
The Associated Press recounted the story of a man in the days following his death, spending time with him and with those around him. In an interview the day before his death, Fuller said he wanted to show the citizens of the country how these laws work.
For him, the decision to end his life at age 75 was, if not easy, never questioned.
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A LONG RELATIONSHIP WITH DEATH
Death did not scare Bob Fuller. It was with him since he was young.
He grew up in Hooksett, New Hampshire, the second of four children. His father was a furniture manufacturer, his mother a housewife. He described their relationship as unloving and unhappy, but he was close to his sick grandmothers and often sat with them.
When he was 8 years old, his father's mother, seriously depressed, drowned in the Merrimack River after leaving his glasses and slippers on the shore. He recalled seeing his body in the water, a trauma that had marked the beginning of his long factual relationship with death.
He called his "default setting": "If life becomes painful, you go to the Merrimack River."
Fuller's friends described him as a playful, wise, witty and dynamic player, a wonderful singer and the kind of person who collected friends everywhere. He sponsored people in rehabilitation for addiction and alcoholism after quitting drinking in 1983. In retirement, he set up a coupon program – now named after him – through the intermediary of the government. LGBTQ support organization, Peer Seattle, which provided music and theater tickets to those who could not afford them. .
As a former nurse, he looked like an unofficial deputy director in his building, helping residents to change bandages or pick them up when they were falling into their kitchen.
But his old default setting persisted for much of his life, a kind of undercurrent to how he lived "out loud," as he put it.
He tried to commit suicide in 1975, he said, while he was drinking too much and discouraged after the end of his marriage; he had revealed to his wife that he was gay. Fuller had moved to Seattle to attend a nursing school. He was working as a psychiatric nurse at Harborview Medical Center when he swept narcotics, went to a nearby park, swallowed them, and lay down to die.
He called for help when it started to rain, he said. He did not want to die cold and wet.
In the mid-1980s, Fuller helped heal friends with AIDS and administered a lethal dose of medication to one of them at the end of his fight, he said. But his own sexual behavior was so risky that he was almost suicidal. He contracted AIDS and lived long enough to benefit from the AIDS drug mix when it was developed in the mid-1990s.
"I think I wanted to contract AIDS," he said. "All my friends were dying."
For critics, this type of fatalism is a major problem of the laws of assisted dying. Some AIDS patients who have chosen to end their lives may have lived long enough to benefit from the mix of AIDS medications, such as Fuller, said Wesley J. Smith, author and law critic.
Beyond that, letting people hasten their death represents an abandonment, a signal to the terminally ill that their lives are not worth living, he said.
"We should be very concerned that we normalize suicide in our society, especially just when we are saying that suicide is an epidemic," Smith said.
That such deaths constitute suicide is a semantic debate. In Washington and other states with dying laws, coroners are prohibited from classifying death as suicide; instead, they list the natural causes. Opponents, including the American Medical Association, argue that "assisted suicide" is more accurate.
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"Why should I suffer?
Fuller had long thought that if he ever wanted to be terminally ill, he would want to control his death. This idea was reinforced two years ago, when a woman in her building used the Washington law, he said. She explained her requirements, including that two doctors must certify that you have less than six months to live, that you must be competent and that you must ask for deadly drugs twice in person and once in writing, under the eyes of two people.
Last summer, he went to the doctor with a sore throat. It turned out to be an aggressive cancer at the base of his tongue. He started a series of chemotherapy, but abandoned it saying that it was killing his soul. At the beginning of the year, he chose a date, May 10, and started planning.
"Why should I suffer?" he said. "I'm totally at peace with that."
In the months that followed, he put his affairs in order. He climbed the Space Needle and set off on a road trip along the Pacific Coast Road with his partner and guardian of the past few years, Reese Baxter.
Cancer closed his throat, making it difficult to eat, but he had the Mexican restaurant at the corner one last time.
On Facebook, he described his pain, his weight loss and his last visits with old friends.
Fuller began to return more often to the Catholic church in which he had been involved for a long time. His spiritual views were hardly orthodox – he considered himself a shaman and described his imminent death as a state of "perpetual meditation" – but St. Teresa's parish in Seattle was renowned for its ability to accommodate various beliefs. Fuller was loved there and he implored the community. He had sung in the gospel choir and read the lectern scriptures during the services, sometimes uttering insightful or amusing remarks, said Kent Stevenson, the director of the choir.
Stevenson attributed the "tenacity and clarity" of Fuller's choice.
"It was hard even to cry because he was so open and so sober about it," Stevenson said. "He was so shockingly unique and his character was very much in line with Bob's."
The Roman Catholic Church opposes the laws on helping the dying, citing the sanctity of life. But Fuller's decision was widely known and accepted by the parishioners. In the service where he received his last communion on May 5, Reverend Quentin Dupont brought a group of children dressed in white who received their first communion.
They raised their arms and blessed him.
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THE END
As he hugged his friends and sang at his party, Fuller looked serene, betraying no sign of reexamination. He also kept his sense of humor, greeting a reporter saying, "I'm dying to read your story."
"You can find me in the eyes of God, you can find me in beautiful music," he told the crowd. "You can find me in terrible, terrible farts."
He invited those who wished to be with him for his death to come up. Friends crammed into his room. He changed into navy blue satin pajamas and lay down in bed.
"It's hard to be here, but I would not miss it," said Yvonne Kilcup, of Tacoma, who Fuller began sponsoring in turnaround 24 years ago. "He gave me a good kick in the buttocks, now I'm going to stand up as he passes."
In the kitchen, two volunteers from the nonprofit organization End of Life, Washington, mixed drugs and Kahlua in a glass measuring cup. They said that they consider themselves midwives, helping people to get out of the world instead of bringing it in.
"You know that if you do that, if you put that in your system, you will sleep and you will not wake up?" one of her, Stephanie Murray, told her while she was distributing the syringes.
"Yes," Fuller replied.
Fuller plunged the syringes.
After a few moments of quiet silence, he led his friends singing: "I'm so happy we spent this hour together," a sign of Carol Burnett's old TV show.
His eyes closed for longer and longer periods.
"I'm still here," he says.
And then, he was not there.
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