The Undertaking (16 page)

And sad as I was for Uncle Eddie,
all that night I tossed and turned among gray images of suicides I’d known. The boy who went out in the woods and hung himself and wasn’t found until hunting season. The man with cancer and a deer rifle who sat with the barrel under his chin considering his options for an hour, making his case to the video-cam, then pulled the trigger. How bits of his skull were wedged into the wormwood panelling.
His wife would find them afterward, for months, and call me wondering what she should do. And why it was he never turned the camera off.

Or the pills and booze crowd, mostly women, who washed down handfuls of antidepressants with half bottle chasers of Absolut. How one got dressed up in her wedding gown and did the same damage with pink champagne, her careful handwriting turning to scrawl: “I’m
sorry. I love you. I’m in such pain….” And the household poisonings, rat killers, drain openers, paint thinners, liquid bleach—how the bodies would come to us foaming tiny white bubbles from every orifice.

The girl who climbed up the water tower. We would have counted her an accident until the medical examiner found breaks and fractures from her hips to heels. “You fall head first,” he said.
“Feet first’s a jump.”
Multiple Injuries
he ruled it—
Suicide.
I remember that poor child’s family—each of them wondering what it was they’d done or failed to do or could have, should have, might have, would have surely done if they’d only known whatever it was that drove her up and down. Damned if they did or if they didn’t, they went their own ways after that, alone. Or the woman who holed up
in her room with a hot plate and her toddlers and a gun for days before she let the children out with a note for their father; then she shot herself. He loved and hated her ever after. Or the friend of mine who lay between his Buick’s dual exhausts and breathed and breathed till he was out of breath and at a loss to
say exactly what it was went wrong. There were, of course, the usual theories.
Overbearing parents. A loss of faith. Confusion over sexuality. His troublesome madness? Genius? Either way, he’s long since gone. His wounded people, still hungry for answers, stumble after him, with the lameness that comes from a foot in the grave.

Each of these suffered a strain of the sickness, the sadness that lies to the one who has it—the one that says it will never get better, no safe
harbor, no choice in the matter, no available kindness but to quit. It’s the sickness that makes its victims listless, hopeless, helpless, lifeless as stones. It’s the grim indifference I’ve seen in the eyes of my own darling son once that made me shiver—the sense that I’ve had since that he could do it. He has the hurt, the deafness, and blindness for it—the will, despite all that we know of love,
to go that distance utterly alone: the determination I have always admired and I have always feared.

Unlike Janet Adkins from Portland, Oregon, or Linda Henslee from Beloit, Wisconsin, or Esther Cohan from Skokie, Illinois, or Catherine Andreyev from Pennsylvania or Ruth Neuman from Columbus, New Jersey, or Lona D. Jones from Cheser, Virginia, or Bette Lou Hamilton from Ohio or Patricia Cashman,
Jonathan D. Grenz and Martha Jane Ruwart—all Californians—or dozens of others who made their ways across the country or the county line, still unable to take the final fatal steps alone. We call it helpful, here in Michigan, to give the gas, to slip the needle in.

Perhaps it is our
nature
to die, not our right. Maybe we have the
ability
to kill, to make things dead, even ourselves, but we haven’t
the right. And when we exercise that ability, in the name of God (as we have done in war), or of Justice (as we have done with capital punishment), or of Choice (as we have with abortion), we should have the good sense to recognize it for what it isn’t: enlightenment, civilization, progress, mercy. Nor is it an inalienable right. It is, rather, a shame, a sadness, a
peril from which no congress’s
legislation, no churchman’s dispensation, no public opinion or conventional wisdom can ever deliver us. For if we live in a world where birth is suspect, where the value of life is relative, and death is welcomed and well regarded, we live in a world vastly more shameful, abundantly sadder, and ever more perilous than all the primitive generations of our species before us who were sufficiently
civilized to fill with wonder at the birth of new life, dance with the living, and weep for the dead.

Is a suicide less a killing than a homicide? When the killer and the one killed are one and the same, does it mitigate the offense of killing? And while a suicide may successfully thumb a nose at the rest of us, and may be welcomed into whatever heavens are out there by whatever merciful gods
there are, some things really should be done on one’s own. For suicide to be a
sui
-cide (a killing of one’s self by one’s self) it really ought to be done without assistance, without license, and without a moral proxy or surrogate. Does the ability to end life on our own terms suggest the right to do so, anymore than my ability to piss on my neighbor’s daylilies implies an inalienable right to
do so?

Few people are drawn to the discussion of such things. The folks I have coffee with most mornings in town are not so much “for” Kevorkian as indifferent to him. It is a sample heavily weighted with males—retirees and attorneys and small businessmen. Maybe it is only a sign of the times. Even when, after the excitement of the trials was over, Dr. Jack started delivering bodies to local
hospitals, in keeping, according to one forensic psychiatrist, with the profile of serial killers who kill and dump and who need increasing doses of risk and stimuli; even when former jurors began to voice doubts; even when Dr. Jack applied for a concealed weapons permit, no one seemed to be much bothered. Of course, the dead were almost exclusively women, none of them local, none of them known to
us, none of them young enough to interest anyone.

The absence of outrage is an outrage itself.

I should say what it is I am not saying here. I am not saying that we may not kill ourselves. We may, of course. Free Will is the name we give to this. We can likewise refuse any and all treatment designed to prolong our life or prevent our death. Whole segments of the population will never have to
endure these “extraordinary measures”—not by choice but by simple economy. We don’t have to wait until we’re dying to do this. We can begin today. Just say
No thank you.
Just say
Goodbye.
I am not saying that we won’t go to Heaven, or Las Vegas or into the void on account of these decisions, whatever they are. Nor am I suggesting that we endure any pain for which there is a medicine or treatment.

I am not suggesting that the professionals in Medicine or Pastoral Care or Government or Business have done all they could for our frightened and needy and endangered species. That so many are living and dying without the most basic creature comforts and protections in a country that has them in abundance is a scandal and a scourge. We have been far too tolerant of pain and suffering when it isn’t
our own. We are far better at fixing parts than people, far better at saving souls than comforting sinners, far better at killing than caring for the wounded.

Nor have we amateurs been much better—we parents and spouses and siblings and friends, we sons and daughters—we turn from the dying of the ones we love, as if their dying made them strange, abandoning them to the clean hands of trained
professionals who regard the unfixable human condition as a waste of precious and highly priced time.

Is it possible to assist the ones we love with their dying instead of assisting with their killing?

I pose these questions not because I have an answer but because it seems we are there again. The rape victim in the back alley with coat hanger for whom the courts legalized abortion now is the
pain-wracked incapacitant,
in extremis
,
gone past the point of pulling a trigger or taking a pill, half comatose with morphine, beyond all hope, pleading for his or her right to assistance with the suicide they never got around to. This image is not a fiction. People are living this way. They are the exceptions, the painful cases—maybe the pitiful five percent, like the five percent of abortions
performed for rape or incest or the sake of the mother’s life.

Is there a way to care for these needy people without declaring another open season, a general Right to Die or Right to Choice or Right to Assisted Suicide?

Are we obliged to resolve the issue of assisted suicide the way we have never managed to resolve the issue of abortion? Must we join our teams again, get out the placards and
the megaphones?

On all sides of the issue of assisted suicide there are those who caution against comparisons to the abortion debate. They caution against confusing the issue when what they mean to say is that such comparisons confuse the politics and the special interests. The comparison, in fact, clarifies the issues—they are both about how the living define the value of life and the meaning
of death and the relative worth of each. Both issues are about borders and boundaries and “being” itself. And they both are about money and politics and special interests and the people who make their living off divisions in the citizenry. Assisted suicide and abortion are as near to mirror images of the same existential concerns as life in this century will provide. And if a review of the last
quarter century living with safe and legal abortion does not tell us exactly how to settle the current debate, it surely tells us how we shouldn’t.

Left to the courts, we’ll get a late-century version of
Roe v. Wade
—a half-baked contraption of a court decision that has utterly divided people of goodwill and careful thought on both sides of the issue of abortion and turned them into para-legals,
pseudo-litigants, armchair lobbyists, and dangerous zealots. “Why,” as one supreme court justice has already asked, apparently
learning from past mistakes, “would you want to leave the decision in the hands of nine attorneys?”

Left to chance, if we cower from the difficult issues, we get Kevorkian or a variation on his pathological if oddly cartoonish theme. Maybe a new and improved version of
Triple S? But this time, maybe
Suicide Support & Supply.
The logo still works, the slogan holds:
Don’t leave a mess call TRIPLE S!
The kitchen magnets could be mass mailed to nursing homes, retirement villages, homeless and battered spouse shelters, support groups for Alzheimers and multiple sclerosis and muscular dystrophy and Lou Gehrig’s Disease. Word would get around. Why should Kevorkian
have a corner on the market? And why only pathologists or doctors? Why not the clergy, why not academics, why not tradespeople and farmers and retired politicians and the press? They all know misery when they see it. They all know what it takes to kill. When it comes to killing and to mercy, what makes M.D.’s more qualified than D.O.’s Ph.D.’s, C.P.A.’s, M.B.A.’s or S.O.B.’s? If someone’s going to
assist you, after all, in your one and only suicide, oughtn’t you to have, at least, a choice? Wouldn’t you rather a priest than a proctologist? Wouldn’t you rather a philosopher than a brick mason? Wouldn’t you rather a poet than an undertaker? And wouldn’t you rather make a donation than pay a fee? And why would it possibly make any difference?

And why only lethal injection or poison gas? Why
not hanging? It’s tidy enough. “Stand here. Chin up. There now. Press here.” Or why not electrocution? “Sit here. Relax. Take a deep breath. Press here.” Or those little but lethal hand-held air hammers they use in the slaughter house for cattle on kill day? “Look up, close your eyes, now squeeeeeeze.” And why, for crissakes, why not guns? They’ve more than proven themselves reliable. They are
the weapon of choice for most of the century. Why not pearl-handled, silver-bulleted, hair-triggered, .22 caliber Smith & Wessons? Pressed under the right earlobe, the entrance wound is tiny, the severence of the spinal
cord is immediate and humane, and the exit wound, if indeed there is any, leaves no mess at all. Open caskets would be no problem. Perhaps a trash can lid, lined with bullet-proof
netting could be held by the patient in his or her left hand to catch the debris and the silver bullet. It could be called, in the style of Dr. Kevorkian’s wordsmithing, a
Sanitron.
Would there be any market for these bullets and shell casings, set tastefully in commemorative pendants or earnings or ankle bracelets, for surviving family members? Would people be willing to pay for such things?

And why only the terminally ill? If there is a right to die, a right to death with dignity, a right to be free of meaningless existence, free of pain and torment and tortuous hurt, then who gets to say that right belongs to some of the citizenry and not to all of it. Why not alcoholics? Why not the adult children of alcoholics? Why not the teenage grandchildren of alcoholics? Why not victims of sexual
abuse or spousal abuse, of broken marriages or broken hearts or tax audits? Is their pain not real? Is their torment unworthy? Is there someone in the court or the congress or the church who has the say about which painful case is painful enough? Do we treat terminal people or terminal parts?

If the courts have broadly interpreted “the life of the mother” clause of their abortion rulings to include
the economic life of the mother, the social life of the mother, the emotional life of the mother, the educational life of the mother, in order to extend the term and circumstances under which a woman might legally seek to terminate her pregnancy, should we reasonably expect the same courts to limit the exercise of a right to assisted suicide to anything narrower than life itself, which is,
demonstrably, a terminal condition? And since my daughter is equally vulnerable to deadly depression as she is to unwanted pregnancy, is it wishful thinking to suppose she’d have to seek parental consent for the termination of one and not the other? Is she not entitled to privacy? Autonomy? Equal protection under the law?
And why all these women? Is there a message there? Before Dr. Jack, nine
out of ten attempted suicides were women while five out of every six successful (maybe “completed” is a better word) suicides were men. Men were simply better at it. Unless, of course, one figures (on the axiom that a negative multiplied by a negative renders a positive) that failure at suicide is the mathematical equivalent of success. But among Kevorkian’s devoted fatalities, fully seventy-five
percent are women. Their average age of fifty-seven years situating them on one edge or the other of the empty nest and menopause. Is this the leveled playing field or gendercide? Is it sexism or affirmative action? Playing favorites or gender-norming? Or is it one of those Women’s Issues men are supposed to keep quiet about, the way they were told to about abortion, as if it were the gender, not
the species that reproduces.