An old wire-service piece about the Netherlands, where assisted suicide was no longer prosecuted, claimed that doctor-initiated killings had grown to 2 percent of all recorded Dutch deaths, with 25 percent of physicians admitting they’d euthanized patients deemed unfit to live, without the patients’ consent.
Years ago, while working Western Pediatrics Medical Center, I’d served on something called the Ad Hoc Life Support Committee—six physicians and myself, drafted by the hospital board to come up with guidelines for ending the treatment of children in final-stage illness. We’d been a fractious group, producing debate and very little else. But each of us knew that scarcely a month went by when a slightly-larger-than-usual dose of morphine didn’t find its way into the mesh of tubes attached to a tiny arm. Kids suffering from bone or brain cancer, atrophied livers, ravaged lungs, who just happened to “stop breathing,” once their parents had said good-bye.
Some caring soul ending the pain of a child who would’ve died anyway, sparing the family the agony of a protracted deathwatch.
The same motivation claimed by Eldon H. Mate.
Why did it feel different to me from Mate’s gloating use of the Humanitron?
Because I believed the doctors and nurses on cancer wards had been acting out of compassion, but I suspected Mate’s motivations?
Because Mate came across obnoxious and publicity-seeking?
Was that the worst type of hypocrisy on my part, accepting covert god-play from those I greeted in the hall while allowing myself to be repelled by Mate’s in-your-face approach to death? So what if the screeching little man with the homemade killing machine wouldn’t have won any charm contests. Did the psyche of the travel agent matter when the final destination was always the same?
My father had died quietly, fading away from cirrhosis and kidney failure and general breakdown of his body after a lifetime of bad habits. Muscles reabsorb-ing, skin bagging as he devolved into a wizened, yellowed gnome I hardly recognized.
As the poisons in his system accumulated, it took only a few weeks for Harry Delaware to sink from lethargy to torpor to coma. If he’d gone out screaming in agony, would I now harbor any reservations about the Humanitron?
And what about people like Joanne Doss, suffering but undiagnosed?
If you accepted death as a civil rights issue, did a medical label matter? Whose life was it, anyway?
Religion supplied answers, but when you took God out of the equation, things got complicated. That was as good a reason as any for God, I supposed. I wished I’d been blessed with a greater capacity for faith and obedience. What would happen if one day I found myself being devoured by cancer, or deadened by paralysis?
Sitting there, hand poised to strike the ENTER key, I found that my thoughts kept flying back to my father’s last days. Strange—he rarely came to mind.
Then I pictured Dad as a healthy man. Big bald head, creased bull neck, sandpaper hands from all those years turning wood on the lathe. Alcohol breath and tobacco laughter. One-handed push-ups, the too-hard slap on the back. He’d been well into his fifties by the time I could hold my own against him in the arm wrestles he demanded as a greeting ritual during my increasingly rare trips back to Missouri.
I found myself edging forward on the chair. Positioning myself for combat, just as I’d done as Dad’s forearm and mine pressed against each other, hot and sticky. Elbows slipping on the Formica of the kitchen table as we purpled and strained, muscles quivering with tetany. Mom leaving the room, looking pained.
By the time Dad hit fifty-five, the pattern was set: mostly I’d win, occasionally we’d tie. He’d laugh at first.
Alexander-er, when I was young I could climb walls!
Then he’d light up a Chesterfield, frown and mutter, leave the room. My visits thinned to once a year. The ten days I spent sitting silently holding my mother’s hand as he died was my longest stay since leaving home for college.
I shuttered the memories, tried to relax, punched a key. The computer—perfect, silent companion that it was—obliged by flashing a new image.
A site posted by a Washington, D.C.-based handicapped-rights group named Still Alive. A position statement: all human life was precious, no one should judge anyone else’s quality of life. Then a section on Mate—to this group, Hitler incarnate. Archival photo of Still Alive members picketing a motel where Mate had left a traveler. Men and women in wheelchairs, lofting banners. Mate’s reaction to the protest: “You’re a bunch of whiners who should examine your own selfish motivations.”