‘Wild and Precious Life' / ‘A Mother's Love' by Deborah Ziegler

Published in the USA under the title ‘Wild and Precious Life’ and in the UK with the title ‘A Mother’s Love’, this text is Deborah Ziegler’s account of the life of her daughter, assisted dying activist Brittany Maynard, from early childhood until her death, and of Brittany’s determination not only to access assisted dying for herself, but to spark legislative change in her home state of California, across the USA, and beyond. The text provides a vivid, and not always entirely positive, portrait of Brittany, with emphasis on what her mother deems some of her most cherished characteristics. While the text predominantly recounts Brittany’s story, the author’s voice is clear within it, as she seeks to establish her role as Brittany’s mother. The text features various implicit and explicit reflections on what it means to be a ‘good’ mother, both during the narration of Brittany’s childhood, teenage years, and young adulthood and following her terminal diagnosis and decision to access assisted dying. Associated with these reflections are expressions of guilt over what Debroah deems missed signs of Brittany’s illness and of supposed failures in being a ‘good’ mother. The text also positions Brittany’s life story in dialogue with the stories of other friends and family members, anchoring it in a wider family narrative. Deborah’s personal faith becomes an important aspect of the text, too, particularly in terms of the tension she experiences, at times, between supporting her daughter’s wish for an assisted death, and even considering ending her own life alongside her daughter, and her faith position on these issues. That said, as the text progresses, Deborah seems to be able to reconcile the two, offering an interesting insight into the impact of personal experience on religious conviction. In recounting her experience of grief and of coming to terms with Brittany’s decision to end her life, we might suggest that the text becomes an active component of this process (albeit partly after the fact). This suggestion provides a helpful means of understanding Deborah’s recurrent engagement with Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s model of grieving stages, as the text becomes a space in which these stages can be voiced and worked through.

Aesthetically, the text is a rich tapestry, woven from dated, diary-style chapters that move alternately back and forth between Brittany’s life prior to diagnosis (beginning from early childhood) and her current life. The text offers detailed, intimate insights into Brittany’s life, with some details painting her in a less than positive light, but which contribute to the public knowledge of Brittany as a key figure in the lobby for legislative change regarding assisted dying. The intimacy of the insights shared is juxtaposed with detailed explanations of medical procedures and test results, which use technical medical terminology, capturing something of the disorientation experienced by Brittany and her family following their arrival in this new and disconcerting world. The text is also dense with intertextual references: each chapter features its own epigraph, which is often drawn from a work of literature or other cultural production. Perhaps these epigraphs offer a nod to Brittany’s own love of reading and wider engagement with culture. A recurrent intertext also develops with the character of Mary Poppins, who begins as an important figure in Brittany’s childhood, but to whom, as Brittany grows and eventually becomes a nanny herself, she is compared. Various works of poetry are likewise referenced throughout the text, with the poems of Mary Oliver (a poet cherished by mother and daughter alike) occupying a particularly important role, not least as they are read to Brittany following her administration of the lethal medication. Allusions to other media and research articles, and cultural productions on the topic of assisted dying (such as the film How to die in Oregon, which Brittany invites her husband, mother and step-father to watch as a means of educating themselves), alongside reproduced emails, text messages, social media and blog posts authored by Brittany and Deborah weave further intertextual connections into this increasingly multimodal depiction of Brittany’s life, death, and (pre- and post-death) activism. The structure of the text also seems significant: 30 chapters, arguably representative of Brittany’s almost 30 years of life, with an epilogue (the 31st chapter) recounting Deborah’s trip to Machu Picchu, a trip she promised Brittany she would make, exactly one year after her daughter’s death, and which serves, in some ways, to close the loop on both the text and this portion of Deborah’s life.

First and foremost, this text serves to extend and deepen public knowledge of Brittany Maynard (albeit that Dan Diaz, Brittany’s husband, has questioned the accuracy of some of the episodes recounted) and to ensure that her legacy lives on. It highlights various reactions to Brittany’s story, including the popular media frenzy that surrounded Brittany’s decision to end her life, and Deborah’s response to the Vatican’s critique of Brittany’s decision, among others. The desire for Brittany’s story to bring about legislative change is likewise apparent in the text, which includes, for example, a transcript of Brittany’s recorded legislative testimony. The final chapter also offers explicit engagement with the legislative impact of Brittany’s story, primarily in the passing of California’s End of Life Option Act (2015), while the text’s acknowledgements clearly point to the advocacy work in which Deborah was and continues to be engaged. The fact that Deborah decided to write and publish this text created a level of tension between her and Dan Diaz, who wrote, in a statement posted on Facebook, that Brittany did not want her mother to tell her story. Indeed, Brittany reportedly went as far as to say that ‘[her] mother might be the biggest problem regarding protecting [her] story.’ In her will, Brittany signed the rights to her story over to her husband, as he was ‘the only one that [was there] for [her] the entire time and […] the only one that c[ould] share the meaningful private moments that [she] would want shared’, and made him promise to ensure her story would only be shared within the parameters she had set prior to her death. Nonetheless, Deborah Ziegler has become an important figure in her own right, joining the Board of the US lobby group Death With Dignity and contributing to discussions regarding the introduction of assisted dying across the USA. Through her work with Death With Dignity, Deborah has sought to extend the impact of Brittany’s story and to continue pursuing the fulfilment of her daughter’s desire to effect legislative change, so that no other US citizen has to experience what she and her family did by having to leave their home and move state in order to access assisted dying. Although not widely cited in parliamentary debates on the topic, Deborah’s advocacy work with interest groups continues to feed into legislative and societal conversations regarding assisted dying in the US.