Grief in One Hand, Joy in the Other

Marianne, you and I have known each other over the phone, over phone conversations way back a few years ago when you were considering something like this podcast to talk about the issue of MAID and how it could be approached from an Indigenous perspective.

And at that time, I was the regional medical director of Indigenous Health for Vancouver Coastal Health Authority.

And we were trying to find ways to support this work that you're now doing, thinking that it would be some kind of documentation of your own journey towards having made.

And here we are, like a few years later, not thinking that this kind of a timeline would exist.

So I am just so, so thrilled and happy.

And it reminds me why I am such a fan of science and what science can do, what science has done in our lifetimes.

Um, and yeah, just, I'm just so incredibly blown away by, by your journey.

And, and, you know, I think about how does that interface with us as Indigenous people and our Indigenous worldviews and, um, how you know that you know um interplays with all of this and it just seems like like the creator knew um you know what kind of a person you were going to become and what kind of a voice you would have and how that voice was like sharpened and refined in your career and um in filmmaking and how you you don't shy away from approaching difficult subjects and communicating to the wider world and here you are communicating about this particular subject um that is not easy to talk about in in our cultures and in our communities and yet you bring such a powerful voice and lived experience and perspective to it all and i i do think it's um To say it's valuable is an incredible understatement.

I don't even know what the right words would be to say what you're doing with sharing this journey and addressing this topic and the surrounding topics that crop up around it.

I'm just so impressed and I'm just so grateful to have the opportunity to chat with you about all of this.

Oh, thank you so much for being here.

I mean, I tell you, it feels like a full circle moment to him.

Because even though you and I have never met in person, I had already been thinking about me.

Because like I said, I watched my sister's end of life journey.

with pollinary hypertension, and you were still working in your position at VGH, and you put on social media a question about, are there any Indigenous people, or something like that, Indigenous people considering me? And I had responded, but yeah, it's something that I am considering.

And that's how our conversation started.

And so, you know, I appreciate that.

I appreciated you asking the question because that was the first time I publicly said, yes, this is something I'm considering.

And I think that conversation just has to be started again and again and again.

Because people are willing, really able, not willing, but able to hear it until they're in that situation, until they are facing the end of life.

Yeah.

No, and that was one of the comments we received about the show in general.

It was like, well, there's not actually a lot of conversation about medical assistance in dying.

And we realized that, you know, the conversation started there, but the natural evolution of our conversations as mother and daughter, as patient and caregiver, and also as an Indigenous person in Canada, it grew.

That natural evolution needed to acknowledge that, yes, intergenerational trauma exists and we're still impacted by it.