One last trip: Gabriella Walsh's decision to die — and celebrate life — on her own terms
Gabriella Walsh knew she wanted to die on a Saturday.
She'd settled on July 16, dressing that morning in a flower crown and a T-shirt with a picture of a dragonfly, an image that had comforted her in recent weeks. She took a deep inhale from a bottle of lavender oil and listened to a playlist of sea sounds.
Earlier in the morning, friends and family nuzzled up against her in bed. Rest easy, they told her, and keep wandering.
"I just feel like I'm going on a trip," she said calmly.
Within two hours, she would drink a fatal dose of medications prescribed under California's death-with-dignity law, which allows some terminally ill patients to request drugs to end their lives.
The option had given her profound comfort in her final weeks — as had knowing that, in the end, she'd have Jack Barsegyan, the registered nurse who managed her hospice care, and Jill Schock, a death doula, at either side of her bed.
"My Jack and Jill," she often called them.
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Born Gabriela del Carmen Torres Acosta on the first Friday of 1958, death was, perhaps, her earliest memory, thus stripping away much of her fear of it.
When she was 2, she stumbled upon her grandfather slumped lifeless in the hallway of their family home in Quillota, Chile, an agricultural community north of the capital. A few months later, a chance illness — gorging on so many strawberries that she got severe diarrhea — led to an appointment where a doctor discovered that a small opening in her heart had never closed properly after her birth. She soon underwent open-heart surgery.
Another five years passed, and during their bedtime ritual, her father asked her to let their hug linger, sensing it might be their last.
"Este puede ser nuestro último abrazo."
He died of a stroke within hours, and his body was transported home from the hospital, as was often the custom then. Once the adults cleared out of the living room, she dragged a chair next to her father's body, which was covered by a sheet, and rested her small hand on his shoulder.
