As Quickly as a Wink
A bittersweet story about the death of my grandfather and a grateful testimonial to California's End of Life Act (EOLA)
This piece is about the end of a long life. Don't worry it is not mine. Those of you who know me well understand I am too great to deprive you of the joy that is me.
However, this is a bittersweet story about the death of my grandfather and a grateful testimonial to California's End of Life Act (EOLA). There will be detailed references to euthanasia and if that is not something you are comfortable with, I don't judge you for leaving now. Here's a cute kitten video if you need to escape urgently. I hope you stay though.
For the remaining adventurous souls, this is my attempt at summing up a man who loved me immensely and retelling my family's experience through his death.
At the end of this, I will ask you to help me raise money to support men's physical and mental health through my Movember campaign and consider making a donation to the Death With Dignity organization supporting the right of people with a terminal illness to die on their own terms.
Now let's get to it.
(First thing I've written since cover letters were a thing. Wish me luck.)
My family has always had an odd fascination with the letter Z. I was the first one to wear the letter. Then came Zoe. While my mom forever claimed Zoe's name was a last-minute decision related to a knotted umbilical cord during birth, we have since come to disprove that story with the help of some convenient baby video evidence.
But Zach and Zoe were not the only two Z's in a competitively small immediate family. If you're an Ashkenazi Jew, there's a decent chance you had a Zaide– Yiddish for grandfather. I also have a Zaidi. And yes, you'll have to excuse the way I've spelled it my whole life. The primarily spoken and guttural language of Yiddish has never been easy to transcribe.
My Zaidi, Don Geller was born in St. Paul, Minnesota in 1931. His family moved out to San Francisco when he was 11 years old, and he remained in the Bay Area for the rest of his life, (except for a brief stint in the Korean War–in his case, the more enjoyable German occupation–and a now-eroded island off the coast of Costa Rica).
As a kid, we lived in LA, a quick six-and-a-half-hour drive down from San Francisco, assuming you leave at my family's traditional 4:00 a.m. kickoff. Perched behind the wheel of his impressively large Cadillac, Zaidi made that drive about every month to see me and my sister.
Each time he came down, he would bust me out of prison daycare. Although it's hard to believe since most people now can't shut me the fuck up (their words not mine), I used to be an emotionally and socially inept child. While Zoe was beginning to form the communication skills of a future politician or philanthropist, I was counting blades of grass and testing the gravitational properties of sand.
So when Zaidi arrived with the getaway car, I would book it toward the exit, dodging and sliding past caretaker hands left and right. I'd leap through the passenger-side window, and as the tires screeched away, flip them the smallest bird, knowing we pulled off the Great Escape. . .
That's how I remember it, but more likely there was probably a sign-out sheet. Movies, ice cream, In-N-Out, Albertson's collectible Ninja toys, and more were part of a regular excursion.
After graduating UC Berkeley and living with four friends in San Francisco's Alamo Square, the opportunity to move into an incredible apartment in the Marina with an unobstructed view of the Golden Gate Bridge and Alcatraz was on the table. Plus it had the ultimate perk: I would be across the hall from Zaidi.
In the 1970s, Zaidi had the opportunity to buy a beautiful brick, three-floor, 15-unit building at Webster and Union. He became a quarter owner of the building, but what he probably didn't expect was a quarter of the building would end up occupied by his family. His sister and brother-in-law, himself and his girlfriend, and, at various points in time, three of my second cousins all lived in that building. Truly the modern-day shtetl.
Every day, and I really mean every day, I walked into his apartment to steal coffee, toilet paper, paper towels, and more. Think of it like my own personal Costco. I'd sit on his couch for hours, and we'd discuss anything from the history of organized religion to what is the perfect ratio of matzo and egg for the best-tasting matzo brei.
After I got my fair share of the old man, I'd walk out of his never-locked apartment and shout back:
See you tomorrow Zaid-o!
To which he would respond:
I hope so!
I moved into the apartment when Zaidi was 86. Neither he nor I expected him to live much longer than that, but he did. To top it off, until weeks before his death, he was self-sufficiently cooking for himself, his sister, and his brother-in-law downstairs. When the pandemic felt as if it was "subsiding," I decided to make some changes in my life and move to New York. While tough for many reasons, the one standout was I wouldn't be there for his death, an event he and I had joked about for years.
On Tuesday, September 13th, 2022, my mom called with the news I've been expecting, talking about, thinking about, preparing for, and dreading for most of my adult life. Zaidi was nearing the tail end of the slide. Standing, I grasped my kitchen table with both hands, leaned forward, and had a quick five-minute cry. I then called an Uber for a two-hour ride to JFK with an extra empty suitcase in the trunk.
I made it to San Francisco just after midnight. It was now Zaidi's 91st birthday.
Somehow, Zaidi knew the way he would die his entire life. He used to joke whenever he became a burden on anyone he would "just take the pill" and call UCSF to pick up his body for science. No casket, no grieving, and certainly no funeral. Unfortunately, he got his wish.
For the next six grueling days, my family helped him execute (pun intended even if in poor taste) a death with dignity through the California End of Life Act.
Every day of your life, you wake up just like me, and no matter how much you drank, ate, or snorted (I'm in New York so just want to clarify for all), you have every intention that day of staying alive.
But when we are diagnosed with a terminal disease and life is now counted in weeks or days and no longer years, we realize the game we play every morning is different. No matter what we do, death is the only inevitability. As bodily discomfort, physical pain, and the emotional trauma of feeling like a burden on others begins to invade thoughts, the decision to wake up every day and stay alive becomes less enjoyable than the alternative.
Choosing a quick death is not any more noble or brave than choosing to push through the last few weeks of life. It's just different. We all are different that way. Some of us, myself included, hope to one day enjoy the liberty to make our own decision on the single most important aspect of our lives: our life itself.
I'm proud that Zaidi chose the path to end it on his own terms, just as proud as I would be of him for choosing to push through it. He confidently, with full awareness and cognition, told his primary physician and a second physician he would like to end his own life. Together with hospice, we initiated the End of Life Act process.
Because of unavoidably poor timing, he didn't get the secondary physician's approval until Friday afternoon, after the only pharmacy able to deliver this potion closed. With every passing day, I saw Zaidi get weaker and weaker physically, and still to this day, the toughest part of this whole experience was not his death, but having him ask me on several occasions:
Is it time?
To which I struggled to respond each time:
No Zaid. . . not yet.
At Zaidi's apartment, my mom and I split the gargantuan L-shaped couch just one room over from the old man. We spent nights talking about how much morphine to give him and helping him grasp the straw of the water-filled Gatorade bottle so he could take the world's smallest sips.
I didn't let anyone cry that week. For better or worse, he was still alive and we had a task at hand. There was to be no energy wasted on tears. We had closure every day for nonstop six days, and I have come to accept that it is overrated.
I've also come to realize that in darkness come some of the greatest laughs. Let's take a short interlude for a funny one. Early in the week, Zaidi receives a phone call from his doctor's office. A young woman is on the other end.
Hi, is this Donald Geller? We're calling to set up your hematology appointment. Hopin' you can come in next week. How does Wednesday at 2:15 work for you?
Zaidi, wrapped in a blanket, sitting up on the couch grumbles back at her.
Okay, why do I need to do this again? I have to check with my–actually you know what. I probably won't need it because by next week I'm probably going to be dead.
Pause on the line.
. . . so no appointment Mr. Geller?
Laugh track plays. Scene ends.
It's a miraculous Monday morning. The potion was ready for pickup, but we were still nervous. It was Zaidi's worst day yet and, based on everything we knew, this was not going to be an easy mission.
Remember how Zaidi used to joke about taking the pill? Well, unfortunately for Zaid it was not a pill. Here's how it had to go down:
- This cocktail is a powdery substance primarily consisting of barbiturates. The recommendation is to mix it with a sweet liquid to temper the taste. We chose apple juice.
- It's also not as small as I would have hoped. Think of it like a very small pocket flask. For a guy who has drunk less per day than the TSA will let on a plane, we were concerned he wouldn't be able to drink it all.
- Our concern derived from this: the potion is coma-inducing so Zaidi would have to finish it all within three minutes to avoid passing out during consumption.
- And finally, if he didn't finish the whole thing, it might not work and leave him in a mostly vegetative state.
Yeah. . . game faces everyone.
My position is "fullback" in this event. What that means is I'll be sitting and straddling Zaidi's full back, between him and the bed headboard, with a pillow between us. My responsibility: hold him upright so he can effectively drink the liquid without choking.
Zaidi has a tremor so we needed to ensure he didn't spill any of the liquid during the play. We recruited another player, whom we'll call Elway, to help keep the liquid steady. (I'm holding back their name for privacy since I didn't ask if I could share their name in this story.)
We walk into the room to take our positions.
Don't die on us now Zaid! We're so close.
I can't help myself. As I said, there are jokes in the darkness.
He's weak, but you can see in his eyes he's determined and ready. He tells the hospice his name and that he's aware of the outcome of this procedure. No time for conversation or goodbyes. We did that all week.
Down. . . Set. . . Hike!
Zaidi begins taking sip by sip of this liquid, and I'm in his ear the whole time cheering him on.
C'mon Zaid. You can do it. Just pretend you're back in Germany with your boys!
It's hard to remember how long it took, but he frickin' crushed it. However, he only finished four-fifths of the bottle before slipping into a deep sleep.
The next ten minutes we spent asking hospice, who was down the hallway, what was the proper way to get the rest of the potion into him.
We never found out but it didn't matter. As I sat behind him, straddling his body against mine, I knew it was over. The breathing, the vibrations, and the unrelenting love of my grandfather slipped away.
We lifted his hand and his grasp on this world loosened. The hand dropped to the bed without resistance.
I petted his head one last time on the melanoma scar my sister and I obsessed over as little kids. We love it because it is a perfectly shaped Z.
Goodbye Zaid-o. See you tomorrow. I hope so.
This is my tenth November growing a mustache to raise money for men's health through the Movember Foundation. With the single mission of preventing men from dying too young, Movember raises money every year for men's mental health, suicide prevention, and testicular and prostate cancer research.
As I remember my 91-year-old grandfather who had the opportunity to live an incredibly long life surrounded by a loving family, I can't help but think about every person who doesn't get that opportunity. Globally, on average, one man dies by suicide every minute of every day.
For my tenth year, I plan to raise more than $1,242, in order to surpass $10,000 lifetime dollars raised through my Movember campaign. If you're able to give, please click the link here or below to donate. Thank you so much.
Zach Hawtof
And for those that have been moved by this story, I would like to offer up another charity that's doing great work to support Death With Dignity legislation that has helped me and so many others. Today only eight states and Washington D.C. have legislation in place to allow people to take their health into their own hands. Even NY, my new home state has yet to enact this legislation. Let's try to change that too.
Please consider giving to Death With Dignity which helps both education and legislation for euthanasia laws around the country. They have an A- rating from CharityWatch.org and a 95% approval from CharityNavigator.org.
Here is a link to the 501(c)4 political fund to further legislation and policy initiatives across the country:
Here is a link to the 501(c)3 to support education and legal support for physician-assisted dying laws:
Zaidi would be pissed at me for writing this article.
That old man hated the idea of sharing anything about his life publicly. His funeral was a seven-person dinner at Perry's on Union the night he died. The bill was over $350. He would have hated that too.
He never believed in heaven so the only alta cocker yelling at me right now is the memory of him in my head. But boy is he yelling.
Truly, thanks for reading.