Dr. Death


"I am in the final stages of a terrible disease. I am in constant pain and I want to die." As these words were spoken on national television last night by a young man from Florida calling in to the Larry King Show, it was painfully clear that one of the guests, the Director of the "Anti-Euthanasia Association", simply could not relate to the desperate plea in that voice. For all practical purposes, she ignored him. In her single-minded determination to get Dr. Kevorkian she had become inured to the real, human suffering of the terminally ill who beg for an end with a modicum of dignity. It is one thing to preach about the "gift of life" but quite another to assume the mantle of Life's Constable. For her to insist that Dr. Kevorkian is nothing more than a psychopath mucking around in convalescent hospitals and back alleys looking for more death-machine victims makes about as much sense as insisting that the Sierra Club is just a bunch of selfish yuppies hankering for more campsites.

Are people really so blind to the compassion in Dr. Kevorkian's face? Do they really believe that he is some sort of monster? Are they blind to the bovine, unimaginative, single-mindedness in the faces of his opponents? Are people deaf to the cries of patient/victims lying in beds -- skeletons of their former selves -- full of tubes and needles, which do nothing more than maintain the steady graph on the oscilloscope? It frightens me to think that someday I may be lying in some bed wishing for the warm embrace of the dark void, the joyful entry into the hereafter, and there will stand Mrs. Anti-Euthanasia, eye steadfast on the oscilloscope, checking every tube in it's proper orifice, listening to the drip of the "D5W and Normal Saline" solution into my all but lifeless body.

Of course life is a gift, an adventure to be prized and fought for tenaciously, but unfortunately, there are a few diseases out there which have no known cure and wreck their havoc on us in geometrically debilitating increments. There is nothing that can be done after a certain time, and a merciless, helpless, nightmarish long day's journey into death is all that awaits us. I find it inconceivably stupid and unimaginative to think that these people would not want to die with a semblance of dignity and dispatch.

Despite the "gift of life" they got sick. They went to doctors. They took the medicine, the chemotherapy, herbs, acupuncture. They went to Germany for special treatments. Their bodies withered away. Their savings disappeared. They prayed. They were surrounded by family and friends as they went from 150 to 100 pounds to 85 pounds. They went from wheel chairs to beds. They lay there staring vacantly at the ceiling oblivious of everything but the pain. They gave it their best shot. They were not quitters. They were not "talked into" suicide by some psychopathic Herr Doktor Death.

Life is not simple and Dr. Kevorkian knows this and for the few people who chose to end the unimaginable pain, expense, and humiliating slithering into death, he has been the answer to many, many prayers.