Jocelyn Downie Faculty, Schulich School of Law I don’t find it emotionally excruciating because you’re fighting for somebody else. I was interested in end of life issues from my undergrad. And actually, I was interested in it before it was an educational interest in that I had been a candy striper back in the days when you had candy stripers in the hospitals. I saw a sign for a palliative care program, and I was like, ‘I wonder what that is.’ And then I looked into it and it was really just at the beginning of palliative care in Canada in many ways. I was too young, so I waited. You had to be 18 and I was about 16. So, when I turned 18, I took the volunteer program and I was a palliative care volunteer in Kingston, so I was actually working with people who were dying before I was taking courses and got interested in it as an academic exercise. There was one woman who was dying from complications of diabetes and she was a double amputee, she was blind, I think she was deaf, she was quite young, she had a young child at home and she was in the cardiology unit because heart problems are often a part of that and the cardiologists just weren’t letting her go and this was back when we were fighting the issues of letting people die, to let them say no and let them go. But a lot of physicians took that as failure and they would just fight until the end…And why it’s such a powerful story for me was how wrong it was. She wanted to go, so she should have been a no code, meaning if her heart stopped, they would not be allowed to attempt CPR on her, but they wouldn’t in those days. It was wrong and it was this experience of seeing the wrong so up close and personal, seeing the reality of it, so that powers me through the challenging aspects of fighting these fights. It’s the real people who are hurt by certain policy positions that we as a society have and then you say, ‘OK no, I gotta fight for that.’ I don’t find it emotionally excruciating because you’re fighting for somebody else, which often I find is much easier — I can’t fight for myself — and I’m not in the room with the person who’s being told, ‘No you can’t have access to MAID (medical assistance in dying) because of this or that.’ That would be excruciating. So, I’m actually motivated by the stories that I hear. I’m in a taxi with a woman I’m on a board with and she says, “Oh I meant to tell you, my sister three weeks ago she had MAID.’ I was at a meeting of that same board last week and one of the guys there said, ‘Oh my uncle had MAID, let me tell you the story.’ And sometimes it’s very raw but they’re all stories of relief and gratitude for it being available, so those are affirming and empowering. You know you’re fighting for something that matters and that it makes a difference in people’s lives, so any time you get tired you just think of them and you just keep going. One thing that surprised me was how much we laughed. We would be doing the palliative care volunteer work on the wards and then back up in the common room and you’d be talking and you’d be laughing and it taught me this really important lesson that even in these incredibly sad situations there’s humour and people working in these situations are good at finding humour and joy in life. I can make a story that makes my trajectory make complete sense and it would be a lie. I changed my major three times in four years in my undergrad. So, a lot of it is fate how you end up where you are. I tell the undergrads too, ‘Don’t worry if you don’t know what you want to do. Follow your passions and keep going and be open to change because I never would have ended up having this career if I hadn’t been open to both my changing interests and getting knocked down and kicked in the head and sometimes that’s the best thing that can happen.’ ← Ahmad ↑ Home Danielle →
