Andrée McGrath is living "a really wonderful life." She and her husband of 49 years, Rick McGrath, live in Kanata, Ont., where they golf, take walks and laugh loudly and often.
They travel south for the winter and adore their two grown-up sons. After the 68-year-old was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease about a year ago, she cried. "A lot, a lot, a lot — I cried," McGrath said in a phone interview, choking up.
"I have a wonderful marriage and I frankly wish I had, you know, 20 years of good health, 20 more years to enjoy it," she said. McGrath is determined to keep doing the things she loves. When the time comes that she can't, she said, she wants a medically assisted death.
”I am so in favour of MAID. We've already talked to our family doctor about it and he said, 'well, we're not there yet.' So he knows that his hands are tied," she said.
As of Wednesday, people with dementia in Quebec are allowed to make advance requests for MAID, before they lose the capacity to provide informed consent. But such requests are still illegal under the Criminal Code. "If we could do that in Ontario, I'll probably be one of the first ones to line up and sign it,” McGrath said.
After caring for her mother and grandparents in the late stages of Alzheimer's disease years ago and watching them forget who she was, McGrath is determined not to let her own dementia progress that far. "That's really heartbreaking," she said. The federal government has said it still needs to do more consultat.