Janet Elaine Adkins spent 13 years teaching hundreds of immigrants and refugees to become self-sufficient and independent _ the very qualities she knew were being stolen from her by Alzheimer's disease. Unwilling to relinquish her self-determination, the 54-year-old Portland woman instead chose to give up her life. On Monday, hooked to an intravenous device in a van at a campground near Detroit, she pressed a button that released a lethal drug into her veins and died within minutes. She told Dr. Jack Kevorkian, the retired pathologist who invented the device and was with her: ``You just make my case known.'' ``I have decided for the following reason to take my own life,'' Mrs. Adkins wrote in a short statement made public by her husband. ``This is a decision taken in a normal state of mind and is fully considered. I have Alzheimer's disease and do not want to let it progress any farther.'' People who knew Mrs. Adkins, even briefly, remarked on her enthusiasm and zest for life. She was a strong, decisive woman, family members said. ``She has a real joie de vivre, a real spirit for life,'' said her son Neil. Mrs. Adkins, a native of Longview, Wash., was the mother of three grown sons, Neil, Norman and Ronald, and had three grandsons. She was diagnosed as having Alzheimer's almost a year ago. ``She was an exciting person. She loved philosophy. She loved reading good literature. She was a good musician, loved playing the piano. And really, she loved life and to the fullest,'' said Ron Adkins, her husband of 34 years. ``She was always coming up with ideas of new places to go. ``She was an adventurer. She climbed Mount Hood. She went to the Himalayas and to Nepal and she went up in gliders and in a hot air balloon. And we did travel, we lived in Europe. She spoke French. She taught at the community college ... which she dearly loved. This was a woman that was a very, very special woman.'' As a teacher of English as a second language at Portland Community College, Mrs. Adkins helped Southeast Asian refugees and others gain the skills to survive in America, department chairman Joe Ponce said. She graduated in 1972 from Portland State University, where she majored in English and minored in French. She received her teaching certificate in 1979 and joined the English as a second language program in 1980, he said. In addition to her duties at the college, she had taught workers at Tektronix Inc. in Beaverton and did summer work at Wilson High School. She resigned in June 1989 because she wanted to pursue other personal interests, he said. ``She was a very fine teacher. Anyone who works with the refugee or immigrant programs has to have a lot of personal skills and has to care a lot,'' Ponce said. ``She was enthusiastic, she had a good sense of humor. She certainly enjoyed her work. I think that's a marked sign of a successful teacher, someone who finds the job enjoyable continuously _ certainly for that many years.'' Neil Adkins said his mother also had been an accomplished musician on the piano and had played French horn in college. In recent years, however, she had stopped playing the piano and had trouble reading. Alzheimer's disease is an irreversible degeneration of the brain cells leading to severe memory loss, dementia and death. ``The bomb, as we called it, was dropped on us in June of last year, and it was really very devastating to Janet,'' Ron Adkins said. ``She was very much aware of Alzheimer's and what happens.'' He said his wife knew exactly what she was doing this week and insisted upon it. ``Right up to the very end when she left me and we said our last goodbye, she was holding me up,'' said Adkins. ``And she was very up and very happy with the doctor that she was able to have this way of delivering herself.'' Mrs. Adkins had asked that she be cremated after death, with her ashes to be flown home and dispersed in the Pacific off the craggy Oregon coast. A memorial service was scheduled Sunday. Mrs. Adkins was a member of the National Hemlock Society, which advocates death with dignity, before her illness was diagnosed. ``She felt it was unfair that other people could tell you when to die,'' her husband said. ``She was a wonderful wife and great inspiration to family and friends ... But she didn't want to end up losing her dignity.''
