pictures.

Last Wednesday we ran a story in The Oregonian about Lovelle. Up to this point we had just been running small boxes in our feature section referring people to the website. Here is and excerpt from Don Colburn’s story about Lovelle that ran in the paper September 5th.

Working hard at dying

She’s not complaining, exactly, but here’s Lovelle Svart’s latest insight into her own dying:

“Hard work,” she says matter-of-factly from bed.

She’s been at this work, depending on how you look at it, since she was born 62-plus years ago, or since she found out she had lung cancer nearly five years ago, or since her doctor warned in June that she had less than six months left. Or, on this particular late-August morning, since she came down the night before with what feels like flu.

Sore throat, swollen glands, exhaustion, headache, backache, cough.

Is it the cancer?

Wearing a Cancer Fighter T-shirt and huddled under two blankets on one of the hottest days of the summer, she’s both listless and restless. She shifts uncomfortably from her left side to her right, and reaches out to her bed table for a swig of Gatorade. She’ll talk to the hospice nurse and maybe later try some blueberry yogurt or chicken soup from a can.

“This isn’t just the same old stuff acting up,” she says.

The work of dying from a long-term illness entails not only the struggle against bodily ailments –”the old ones, the new ones and the brand-new ones” –but also the emotional toll.

“You are working on that constantly and looking back on your life and coming to terms with how you have lived,” Lovelle says. “Good, bad and in between.”

Lovelle has been sharing publicly, mostly through online video diaries, the experience of the final phase of her life, including her choice of whether to end her life with a doctor’s prescribed drug overdose under Oregon’s Death With Dignity Act. She hopes to spur people, whatever their age, to ponder and talk about what it means to die.