After writing obituaries for a decade, I received a phone call on Tuesday, Nov. 12, that began routinely enough.
Name of subject?
“Pat Koch Thaler” — the sister of the former New York City mayor Edward I. Koch, his sounding board and a former dean at New York University.
Day of death? “Saturday.”
The 9th, right?
The answer spooked me: “No, the 16th. And she wants to speak with you first.”
I have interviewed the subjects of dozens of obituaries before their deaths. But I’d never been contacted on behalf of someone who was about to take her own life, much less wanted to talk about it.
After 22 years of fending off cancer, Ms. Thaler had run out of miracles. Twice the disease had gone into remission, only to return. One kidney had been removed. She had been bombarded by radiation, chemotherapy and ablation. Finally, the tumors had been declared inoperable.
“My mother died in agony,” Ms. Thaler recalled. Her mother was 62, misdiagnosed and undergoing aan operation to remove her gall bladder when surgeons found her body was riddled with cancer.
Of her own experience, Ms. Thaler said she had been offered a drug that “would slow things down, but would have some serious side effects.”
“And I decided, I’m 92 and a half years old, I have lived a very, very rich life, a very happy life, and I didn’t want to torture myself anymore,” she said. “I did what I could, and knowing that the law is on my side, I decided to take advantage.”
A New Jersey law that took effect in 2019 allows a mentally alert adult — whose prognosis of having less than six months to live has been certified by two doctors — to self-administer a lethal prescription. The powdery medication is mixed with three ounces of juice, must be consumed within two minutes, immediately induces sleep and, within hours, causes death.
Ms. Thaler had been living in a retirement community in Pompton Plains, N.J., since 2007 (after living in Pomona, N.Y., a Manhattan apartment and a beach house in Amagansett) and entered hospice care about seven months ago.
She contacted me for this final interview to publicize the alternatives to prolonging pain and suffering, mentioning groups like Compassion and Choices, which provides information on the Medical Aid in Dying Act. She also wanted to reminisce about her brother Ed, whom I had covered for years as a reporter for The New York Times and The New York Daily News, and to recap her own accomplishments as an activist in the movements against the Vietnam War, as well as for women’s rights and progressive Democratic politics.
She had campaigned for her brother while wearing a “Sister of Koch” button, but said, “I never really liked being identified solely or primarily as Ed Koch’s sister. I liked being his sister, but I had a life of my own.”
Pauline Koch (she changed her name to Pat as a teenager) was born on April 11, 1932, in Newark. Her father, Louis, was a furrier, Her mother, Joyce (Silpe) Koch, managed the household. She had two older brothers, Harold, who became a rug designer, and Edward.
The family moved to Brooklyn, where she graduated from Erasmus Hall High School and earned a bachelor’s degree in English from Brooklyn College. After receiving a master’s degree from Bank Street College, she pursued a career in education that began as a junior high school guidance counselor and ended as dean of arts, sciences and humanities at the School of Continuing Education at New York University.
She married Alvin Thaler, then a producer and director at CBS News, who proposed on their first date.
“In her typical style, my mom didn’t accept the proposal that night because she wanted to do it on her own terms,” said Shmuel Thaler, one of the couple’s three children. “She waited until the second date to accept.”
Mr. Thaler died in 2008. In addition to Shmuel, Ms. Thaler is survived by two other sons, Jon and Jared, and seven grandchildren.
Her opposition to the Vietnam War manifested itself in nontraditional ways. In 1968, the Thalers opened their home for a year to a 12-year-old South Vietnamese boy being treated in New York for injuries sustained from a rocket explosion during the war.
She remembered luring Ed decades ago to attend an abortion rights demonstration, but couldn’t recall ever having changed his mind on an issue on which they disagreed.
“He would often throw out an idea and ask me what I thought about it,” Ms. Thaler said. “I gave him my honest opinion. If I thought it was a stupid idea, I’d say, ‘It’s a stupid idea.’”
As the closest surviving family member and the keeper of the flame after Mr. Koch died in 2013, Ms Thaler was fully aware, first of the rumors, then of the posthumous reporting, that Mr. Koch, who never married, and who spoke publicly about having been lonely as an adult, was gay.
“I don’t believe he was, but I never really asked him,” Ms. Thaler said. “It was not anything that we ever discussed, and it wouldn’t matter to me whatever he was. He was the person I loved.”
Ed Koch himself had a funny way of saying goodbye. When he died, a video accompanying his obituary in The New York Times opened with him asking puckishly: “Do you miss me?”
Ms. Thaler spent her last few days paying bills, disposing of her furniture, distributing her artwork to her children and grandchildren, and confirming the funeral arrangements: She will be buried in a New Jersey cemetery on Monday in a plain pine coffin between her husband and her brother Harold (Ed is buried in Trinity Cemetery in Upper Manhattan).
“I do not believe in an afterlife,” Ms. Thaler said. “I believe the body disintegrates, and whatever remains is the spirit — that, and the memories.”After she learned she had cancer two decades ago, she recalled, “I thought that if I do whatever was necessary they would cure it. But it didn’t work out that way. I went through everything that could cure me, and some of those things were not comfortable, but I did that. But I finally came to the conclusion that Medical Aid in Dying would allow me to choose the time and to die before I really suffered.” She said she paid Compassionate Care Services NJ $6,000 for end-of-life consultations and $900 for the lethal medication.
She chose Saturday, she said, because her children worked, and she wanted a time that would be most convenient. Wearing a white long-sleeved shirt and loose black pants in her apartment, surrounded by her family, she took the powdered medication mixed in apple juice under a doctor’s supervision at 11 a.m.
At 4:58 p.m., she was pronounced dead.
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