SEQUIM — The morning after her friend Linda Fleming died, Ginger Peterhansen went to The Vintage, the senior apartment complex where Fleming had lived.
She went to talk with others who had known Fleming, a 66-year-old retired social worker who learned just a month ago that she had late-stage pancreatic cancer.
Then came the phone calls from the news media, the television cameras and the questions.
Fleming was the first known person to die under Washington’s Death with Dignity Act, which became law less than three months ago.
But Peterhansen, who had become close to Fleming since she moved to The Vintage last year, had already accepted her friend’s decision.
“She was in quite a bit of pain,” Peterhansen said. “She said she probably thought Thursday would be the day.”
Thursday night, Fleming retreated to her apartment with her grown daughter, who had come over from her home in the Seattle area, her doctor and her beloved Chihuahua, Seri.
Then she took the barbiturates that had been prescribed to end her life.
Peterhansen said Fleming told her daughter to take Seri home to her children, so they could care for the small dog who had given her comfort.
“I was very sad,” Peterhansen added, “because I was losing a very good friend.
“But I knew Linda did what she had to do, for herself.
“Each day she was in more and more pain. I saw that. I didn’t want her to go through that for me.”
On Friday afternoon, other women who knew Fleming sat down in The Vintage’s common room to remember her, and reflect on the dramatic change they saw in recent days.
“I was stunned,” said Sally Kruger, calling Fleming brave.
Sue Anderson got to know Fleming because both women owned service dogs.
Anderson is hearing-impaired and travels with a black Labrador retriever, while Fleming’s Seri brought relief from pain and anxiety.
Anderson saw her neighbor transform into a woman who seemed to have found peace.
She had been unhappy, and stopped going to parties at The Vintage after another resident complained about Seri sitting on her lap.
Then came her terminal cancer diagnosis, and the painkillers that clouded her mind.
Fleming stopped taking them, and completed the process that culminated in a doctor’s prescription of the life-ending drugs.
It was as if Fleming had finally let go of a long-borne burden, Anderson said.
“Once she accepted that she was going to die, she was happy.
“She wanted to cross over, in her heart, her mind, her body.”
As the cancer progressed, “she said to me, ‘I feel my body changing, but I’m OK.’
“She had a peacefulness about it. I was happy to see that.”
Kruger, for her part, has heard from others at The Vintage who were upset by, and disapproved of, Fleming’s act.
But “it’s not for us to judge whether Linda was right or wrong,” she said.
“We didn’t have to live with her pain.”
