Supporting a Loved One Through Medical Assistance in Dying

When her cousin Gabe was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer at 42, the hardest part for Kristine Cofsky wasn't the diagnosis. It was watching someone who had always been in control lose every bit of it — and the anger that came with that.

This is the rarely-honest version of supporting a loved one through medical assistance in dying: what it looks like when the dying person is rage-filled and terrified, what changes the moment they're handed back the agency to choose, and what's left for the people who loved them once it's over.

The Anger Before the Agency

Gabe fought hard, and for a long time the fight looked like fury — at a body that had stopped cooperating, at a diagnosis that took the choice away. The turning point came when the family stopped trying to manage his decline and told him: "Okay, we trust you to decide." He chose July 1st. His own Independence Day.

What Agency Gave Him Back

Being handed the date, and the choice, gave Gabe his life back for the weeks that were left — not despite knowing when it would end, but because of it. It's the paradox at the center of MAID: the timeline that makes the loss so concrete is the same thing that hands the dying person something a slower decline rarely offers.

Secondary Grief: Being in the Hallway, Not the Room

Secondary grief is Kristine's own term for it: the grief that belongs to the person standing just outside the room where the dying happens, not in it. It showed up as two years of survival mode after Gabe died, and a guilt she carried for eventually needing to step back from carrying it. Caregivers in that position rarely get told this exhaustion is grief — it just looks like burnout.

Grief vs. Depression, and Why Grief Moves

"I don't think you ever get over grief," Kristine says — but that isn't the same as saying it doesn't change. Grief, in her account, is transformational: it moves, however slowly, and even carries real moments of relief and connection inside it. Depression tends to stay flat and put. That difference in motion is usually the clearest way to tell them apart.

What She Would Tell Herself

Asked what she'd tell herself before going through all of it, and how she wants to go herself when the time comes, Kristine doesn't reach for anything solemn: a big, dirty dance party, with everyone she loves in the room.