I would like them to know and experience my peace, whether they are in the room or not. Whether they know the exact day or not. I would like them to know that I am okay.
From: Sandy Coffey
Sent: Friday, 3 July 2009 5:44 AM
Given the amazingly beautiful and close relationship you have with your mum, you know your assisted suicide is going to be the hardest thing she will ever have to face. Can you give me your thoughts on this?
From: Craig Schonegevel
Sent: Friday, 3 July 2009 12:53 PM
This action will break my mom more than I will ever know. I can only take the strength she is displaying as a lesson in that the hardest thing of all is letting go of somebody you love with your whole heart, your whole life and for whom you live and to allow them to take this action.
I have said in my long letter to my parents (which they have read) that it is okay to say I have had enough, whatever that may personally mean and if it helps. It is not admitting defeat.
I have told my mom how the “angel love” that she has given me all her life was so pure and without it I would have perished long ago. Without that love I would have been a wreck who never experienced total love as God intended.
So, I am privileged to have received such love as most don’t and that in fact it was good that other people never gave it as it could never have matched up. I can only hope that the same feeling of love (she has given me) and how beautiful she is crashes over her daily, numbing her mind.
She, like me, is a private person. I know she, like me, loves the sea. I know she, as she has told me, does not want to carry on living in the same townhouse and complex that we currently do, that she needs a new beginning.
She also has said that she wants solitude afterwards. I have told her this is okay and to ignore people who say this is wrong. I dream that she can move into a flat like at The Bay or Summerstrand No. 1 complex and look at the sea constantly and be left alone by the interruptions of townhouse-complex living.
I hope with my whole heart that with each wave that breaks outside her windows is my inconceivable love, soul medicine that is coming to thank, comfort her, love her, hold her. That like the sea our love is constant even though I am not here.
From: Sandy Coffey
Sent: Friday, 3 July 2009 5:46 AM
Can you tell me the moment you knew there was something seriously wrong with you?
What does Fear mean to you?
What does Courage mean to you?
From: Craig Schonegevel
Sent: Friday, 3 July 2009 12:17 PM
As I am not a specialist in the field of the mind and how it develops, I do not know at what age a human can take in or sense things. So, I believe it was much earlier than I answer you, but to me this was when I knew serious things were happening to me.
I remember having the most terrible headaches at ages five, six, seven and all the vomiting that went with it. How my mom had to phone the library and apologise for books spoilt by vomit.
Unfortunately there were those who did not pay attention to my mother’s instinct when I was having severe headaches. She just knew that there was a very serious problem.
Somehow I ended up in Dr Wickens’s office for the first time and he suspected a brain tumour and said, “Book a plane ticket to Cape Town when you leave my office. I am phoning the professor at Red Cross now!”
When we left his office and entered the lift, I sensed there was a big problem with me. I did not understand the French that the adults had spoken but my spirit knew. As the lift rode down, so too did the tears from my eyes come down as I knew I was very, very sick.
Fear has taken many forms in my life and I suppose many children have the same fears, like of the guys at the school, baddies, who inflict hurt like violence on the world.
The older I have become, the more my fears have tapered off into one: I fear Neurofibromatosis (mainly because I am one of those who falls in the group with life-threatening problems).
I fear its unpredictability. I fear the constant growth of more and more fibromas on my body, because ultimately with every one that grows on the nerve end, the chances increase that it’s a major nerve.
I fear my stomach condition, the adhesions that lead to the most destructive colon operations, both for my body and mind.
I fear more of the current suffering I experience and will experience. I fear dying in pain, from whatever form of death. I fear living with Neurofibromatosis and the colon condition that I have, [what it] has meant for my life and will still mean in the future.
I fear solid food because ultimately it is the cause of blocking in the narrowed section of colon that has formed. So, I take in mainly liquids leading up to Dignitas.
I fear current pain, more pain, suffering and imminent surgeries.
Courage, to me, means taking control of your life and ignoring what the masses and some friends say and taking the action that you know to be right and follow through.
Courage is also admitting your faults. Also it means loving somebody, as well as loving them enough to let go of them.
From: Sandy Coffey
Sent: Friday, 3 July 2009 5:41 AM
How will you like to spend your last 24 hours on this earth?
From: Craig Schonegevel
Sent: Friday, 3 July 2009 7:12 PM
A time of total peace with mind and body. Not to have a “bedtime” as such but if any one of the three
