Welcome to Double Take. I'm Les Silers. We're working hard on season two. In the meantime, here's the first in a series of occasional episodes we're calling single takes. They're shorter stories told by just one person. Mostly, you'll hear the person telling the story, or my questions, and sometimes I'll jump in to provide some context.

This one is about someone who had two days to stop her mother from doing something terrible.

She's sounding more depressed.

She's telling me frequently that she would like to die.

Roberta Bayer teaches political philosophy at Patrick Henry College in Purcellville, Virginia. And like me,

she's a Canadian. By the fall of

2022, Roberta's mother, Joanne, had been in a nursing home in southern Ontario for several

years. She wished the Lord would take her, which is the way she put it. Because of the pain?

Because there's just, there's nothing to do. She's lonely.

COVID had been hard on Joanne. Canada's lockdowns had been pretty severe, and her husband had passed away three years earlier.

She was in a wheelchair with long-term back pain, and her medications weren't working well.

Her family only rarely got into the nursing home to see her, although they did hire a helper to provide extra care inside the nursing home. I think that there was a real sense of being abandoned.

I mean, I couldn't do more, but I'm sure she was feeling abandoned by her family.

Roberta did get up to see Joanne right after the lockdowns eased in 2020. She had a two-week

quarantine after arriving in Canada.

One of her closest friends came up to me who also had very bad back pain and was in a wheelchair

and she grasped my hand and she said, Roberta, Roberta, I want to tell you that I'm going to

die this weekend, you know, that I've chosen to do this because I just can't take this anymore.

And my family are okay with this. And she said, so, you know, will you pray for me? And I said,

well, yes. I mean, of course. And she then, she said, don't tell your mother. And I thought,

you're not kidding. I'm not telling my mother.

I'm not going to tell my mother.

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