Newsom: My Mom's 2002 Assisted Suicide Was 'Horrible'

Gavin Newsom's memoir, Young Man in a Hurry, is out Feb. 24, and the Washington Post zeroes in on "one of the most revealing and emotional passages in the California governor's book": sitting beside his mother, Tessa, in 2002 as she died by assisted suicide, which was not yet legal in California. She'd left a voicemail telling her 34-year-old son that if he wanted to see her again, he only had until the next Thursday—the day she planned to put an end to her years of suffering from metastatic breast cancer.

Newsom says he didn't try to change her mind, and while he's been a champion of California's "End of Life Option Act," which was signed into law in 2015 and later expanded under his governorship, he describes the experience as "horrible." On that Thursday, Newsom and his sister gave their mother her usual pain medication, then remained with her in her San Francisco bedroom as a doctor administered life-ending drugs. His sister couldn't bear to stay, but Newsom says he remained in the room as their mother died and for an additional 20 minutes, "my head on her stomach, just crying, waiting for another breath."

He tells the Post, "I hated her for it—to be there for the last breath—for years. I want to say it was a beautiful experience. It was horrible." Politico reports that in the book, he recalls seeing a look on his mother's face in her final moments "that will never leave my mind. There was no peace that blanketed her." Politico's deep dive into the book and its details—on his marriages, his family history, and his associations with the Getty family—is worth a read (here). Its framing: "Newsom spends more time unpacking his personal history than laying out a governing manifesto—closer to Dreams From My Father than The Audacity of Hope, on the Barack Obama spectrum of political memoirs."