Assisted-Suicide Advocate Ends AIDS Fight His Way

By Laura Mecoy (Los Angeles Bureau), The Sacramento Bee, May 9, 2006

January 2006: Gregg Gour, an HIV patient for nearly 24 years, spoke out in favor of California HB 651, the "Compassionate Care Act."

BURBANK - Dying from AIDS, Gregg Gour spent his last three months traveling cross-country and overseas to deliver a final farewell to family and friends and to advocate for assisted-suicide legislation.

Then, with the meticulous planning that was a hallmark of his life, the 48-year-old former accounting supervisor from Los Angeles took his life Sunday night in a Burbank motel room.

"Don't cry for me," he said in a final e-mail to family and friends. "At last I'm free."

In a final interview with The Bee, Gour said if the bill had become law, he could have taken an overdose of a sleeping pill prescribed by a doctor and had his family with him when he died.

Instead, Gour had just one friend at his side as he suffocated himself using a method he learned from an organization that advocates assisted suicide.

"I wanted to be there to hold his hand," said Gour's oldest sister, Debra Dannemann. "We all did. We felt we couldn't, and he didn't want us to be there because he was afraid it would implicate us."

Michelle Boyaner, a documentary filmmaker who was with him until minutes before his death, said Gour was happy and calm that the "day was here."

"He was so at peace," she said. "I've never seen anything like it."

A gay man who contracted the AIDS virus through unprotected sex, Gour had lived with the disease for at least 24 of his 48 years.

He decided nearly two years ago that he was tired of fighting the virus and quit his medications.

He said he knew, after nursing others through the final stages of AIDS, that he would take his own life rather than subject himself and his family to a long and agonizing death.

Gour became a spokesman for Assembly Bill 651, a controversial measure that would make it legal for doctors to prescribe drugs for terminally ill patients to hasten their deaths.

A similar bill was shelved for lack of votes last year, but supporters say they are encouraged by a U.S. Supreme Court decision this year that rejected the federal government's bid to block Oregon's assisted-suicide law. The California measure is pending in the state Senate.

Gour lobbied for the Assembly bill in Sacramento in January, just before departing in a recreational vehicle with his dog, Cody, for a cross-country trip he called his "Goodbye and No Regrets Tour."

Despite his frustration with the opposition he encountered in the Legislature, Gour continued to make the case for "compassionate choices" in e-mails, interviews and a documentary in the works about his travels from Los Angeles to his mother's home in East Stroudsburg, Pa.

Opponents of the measure on Monday disputed the idea that Gour's situation made a case for the bill.

Marilyn Golden, policy analyst for the Disability Rights and Defense Fund, said the legislation "sounds like a great idea" in a case like Gour's, where the patient is deciding without any coercion.

But she said the high cost of health care could prompt doctors and families to urge someone to end his or her life before that person is ready.

Or, she said, a terminally ill or disabled person might choose suicide in a moment of depression, rather than waiting for the sadness to lift.

Gour, a man with a big smile and an engaging sense of humor, insisted he was experiencing no depression. Instead, his sister said, he used his final days for others.

He'd long been a volunteer, raising money to fight breast cancer and AIDS and helping other groups.

He said many of those he visited had subsequent discussions with their relatives about how they wished to end their lives and what measures should be used to keep them alive.

"If nothing else comes of this, I want people to have talked about it openly ... because it's going to happen to all of us," he told The Bee nine days before his death.

The trip also gave his family and friends a final chance to say whatever they wished to him in person. He wanted no memorial service.

"It helped them accept my decision to stop taking the meds because they could see I was content, and that I was at peace," he said. "I got to say I loved them, and they got to say they loved me."

He had a family reunion in Detroit with 40 relatives, attended a sister's wedding in Denver and estimated he saw at least 100 people en route to Pennsylvania.

He arrived in Pennsylvania in March, parked his RV and traveled by train and plane to New York City, London and Ireland in a "trip of a lifetime."

"Altogether, I saw 10 shows in New York and 12 shows in London," he said. "I drove around most of Ireland - just not Northern Ireland."

Along the way, he kept a long list of people updated via e-mail detailing, often with a great deal of humor, his travels.

Several urged him to abandon his plans to end his life, and he patiently explained that suicide was preferable to the lingering deaths he'd witnessed while nursing two roommates and a lover through the final stages of AIDS.

As early as 1996, when his therapist persuaded him to write a letter to his disease, he had decided he would choose his death.

"You were winning the battle with my immune system," he wrote to the virus in his body. "But I was going to win in the end, because I would end my life, not you."

He fought the disease for eight more years, benefiting from the strides in AIDS research. But he had to keep changing his medications as the virus developed resistance to each one.

Last year, when his doctor told him his new medication would require twice daily injections, Gour decided he didn't want to fight any more.

With his physician estimating he had just six months to live, Gour set out on his tour in February. He traveled farther than he had originally dared plan.

But on April 11, his legs hurt so much during a four-hour trip that he abandoned his new plans to drive his RV back to Los Angeles. He decided to stay in Pennsylvania with his family.

His breathing became more labored as the days passed. He could barely speak without coughing. Walking became a struggle, and he was in pain.

Dannemann, his oldest sister, said her brother spent his final days doing what he loved: watching movies and tapes of his favorite television shows, and being with his family.

At one point, she said he curled up on the sofa next to his 72-year-old mother, placing his head in her lap and letting her stroke his hair as she had when he was a child.

Gour left his family behind in Pennsylvania and flew to Los Angeles on Sunday to end his life.

On Monday, Dannemann said their mother was struggling with her son's death, even though she'd spent months preparing.

"We were up all night, and she said, 'I'm not supposed to outlive my son,' " Dannemann said.

But Dannemann said she was at peace because she shared her brother's faith in an afterlife.

"The last thing I said to him was I will see him in heaven," she said. "I have God's promise that that is where he's going to be."

As he entered his final days, Gour said he felt God was guiding him throughout his final journey.

"I feel God has completely directed this all along the way," he said. "I have even less doubt, less fear and even less anxiety than I did because I feel this has been coordinated and approved by God."

The Bee's Laura Mecoy can be reached at (310) 546-5860 or lmecoy [AT] sacbee.com.

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