As Gov. Peter Shumlin gave his farewell address Wednesday, he summed up his accomplishments, thanked his staff and urged legislators to keep working hard on the issues that meant most to him during his tenure.
He also made news.
The 60-year-old governor publicly revealed for the first time that the death of his father, George, in 2014 came with the help of the state’s end-of-life law that Shumlin had long lobbied for and signed a year earlier.
“I never thought my dad would be able to die with dignity in his home state,” Shumlin told the House and Senate in his farewell address, after noting the passage of the law. His mother Kitty, along with his brother, sister and wife were among those who attended his farewell address.
After the speech, Shumlin confirmed that his father had indeed used a lethal prescription to end his life as the law allows terminally ill Vermonters to do.
George Shumlin died in April 2014 at age 88 at his home in Westminster West. At the time, the governor’s office issued a statement noting his father’s death — but did not reveal that he had availed himself of the nearly year-old law. Shumlin said the fact was never a secret but he had also not gone out of his way to make it public.
“He was suffering from cancer of the esophagus,” Shumlin told Seven Days on Wednesday. “The way you die of cancer of the esophagus is you can no longer swallow. It’s a very slow, painful and miserable death. He turned to his family when it got pretty advanced and said that he wanted to go out with dignity and so we honored his wish.”
As a state senator and gubernatorial candidate, Shumlin was a strong supporter of allowing terminally ill patients to hasten their deaths. In his third year as governor, he signed the Patient Choice and Control at the End of Life law. Vermont was the first state to enact such a law legislatively, while other states have legalized assisted suicide through public votes or court decisions.
Shumlin said that when he signed Vermont’s law, he never anticipated his own father would use it. “As a governor you think about a law and how it affects the people who elected you. You never think — I never did — how’s this going to affect my family?”
Shumlin said he was with his father when he died. “It was a very peaceful and beautiful end to a very productive life,” he said. “I feel incredibly fortunate and I know my family does that my dad was able to avoid awful suffering for about two or three weeks that otherwise would have taken away his dignity.”
George Shumlin and his wife started Putney Student Travel, the business the governor will rejoin and run with his brother after he leaves office Thursday.
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Thank you, Governor Shumlin, for your leadership and support for Act 39, and for sharing your story about your Dad. My parents, Dick and Ginny Walters, were the founders of Patient Choices Vermont, which successfully advocated for Vermont’s End-of-Life Choice Law. My Dad also directed his own dying in 2015. Patient Choices Vermont now works to educated the public about end-of-life choice and to keep Act 39 strong in the face of repeated and continuing threats from the opposition. Betsy Walkerman, President, Patient Choices Vermont
End of life choice is a good thing. The problem with legal assisted suicide is that it destroys real choice, which originates and ends with the individual concerned. Legal assisted suicide spreads the decision making out to others. Doctors decide who can and who cannot get a lethal prescription, so they are the ones with real choice. The so-called “safeguards” protect the doctors. If they were intended to protect the patient, they would extend to the period after the prescription is written and the filled. Although we are told that people want the drugs for “peace of mind” and that many choose not to use them, we will never know who among those who have taken them did so freely or as a result of pressure or of coercion. Pressure can be very subtle, perhaps inadvertent, but it is pressure nevertheless. If one of my adult children, like Shumlin, told a story (in 2011)about how he had tried to get me to have “the conversation” and laughed with a crowd about asking me, at age 87, what I would be doing in 10 years, I would interpret that as his thinking my life was or would become a burden to myself or to him, and I would consider that pressure. As for coercion, without a requirement for disinterested witnesses at the time of a person takes the lethal dose, there is no way of knowing that someone did not put them in his applesauce or iv line, or even force him, struggling, to take them. Apparently, the proponents of assisted suicide are quite willing to tolerate these risks so that they can have what they want.
“He was suffering from cancer of the esophagus, Shumlin told Seven Days on Wednesday. The way you die of cancer of the esophagus is you can no longer swallow.”
So, the question is: How did he swallow the lethal dose on his own? The dose must be self-administered. Would love an explanation of this.