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By John M. Crisp Dr. Jack Kevorkian's lawyer, Mayer Morganroth, told the Detroit Free Press that, at the end, Dr. Death suffered a pulmonary thrombosis when a blood clot lodged in his heart. Morganroth says, "It was peaceful, he didn't feel a thing." How fitting. It appears that Kevorkian lucked into the quiet death that all of us covet, but which will be denied to most. What's death like? Death really is the last great frontier, the boundary beyond which lies the terra incognita of oblivion or a mansion in Heaven. Or maybe something else. Really, no one knows. But Kevorkian was less concerned with what lies beyond than with how we get there, and he devoted his life's energies into easing the passage. We all desire the quiet transition that he appears to have achieved. But in Dr. Sherwin Nuland's book "How We Die," he testifies from his observations of the deaths of hundreds of patients that the point of death rarely resembles the tranquil departure depicted in the movies. Death, he says, is often ― maybe usually ― a prolonged, miserable experience that comes at the end of days, weeks, or months of dehumanizing suffering. Kevorkian imagined that things could be different. He was no theoretical advocate of assisted suicide; he helped some 130 terminal patients avoid the suffering inherent in their diseases and achieve some of the dignity that comes with controlling the circumstances of one's own death. As a result, he spent eight years in prison. He may not have helped his cause with his outlandish, disheveled, publicity-thirsty persona. In one of his many court appearances, Kevorkian showed up in knee britches, a powdered wig, and a colonial era tri-cornered hat, his effort to dramatize his opinion that our attitudes toward assisted suicide are provincial and backward. The image reminds me of the lives of two colonial characters, Jonathan Edwards and Benjamin Franklin. For the Puritan theologian Edwards the human journey for most people was about suffering, both before death and afterwards in hellfire. On the other hand, his contemporary, Franklin, knew how to enjoy life despite his praise for frugality, self-denial, and hard work. He easily left behind the hardcore Puritanism of the world he was born into and structured his long life around a deep appreciation for its pleasures and rewards. In his later years, however, Franklin suffered terribly from gout and kidney stones, maladies that laid him up for weeks at a time. Nevertheless, he approached death with equanimity. During his last 10 days, his lungs failed him and, without modern treatments and painkillers, he suffered terribly before he died. Many of us have never gotten over Jonathan Edwards' beliefs in the connections among death, suffering, and submission to the terrible will of God. But I'd like to think that Franklin, with his appreciation for good living, tolerance, and commonsense pragmatism, would have understood precisely what Kevorkian was working toward. It takes a lot to get through to us these days, and perhaps a quiet reasoned effort by Jack Kevorkian to transform our attitudes toward assisted suicide would have been thoroughly ineffective. Kevorkian faced a hard battle in one of the world's most religious countries, where many of us suffer from the notion that God's will must be played out to the very end, even if it requires a painful, miserable passage into the great beyond. We imagine that any life is better than no life, and even Christians who believe that the afterlife is an eternity of bliss are reluctant to let go of the present. Kevorkian was skeptical of such a tenacious hold onto life at all costs. Death always wins in the end, but he was committed to human beings' right to take some control of the way they leave this world. So long, Jack. And thanks for moving our thinking a long way in the right direction. John M. Crisp teaches in the English Department at Del Mar College in Corpus Christi, Texas. E-mail him at jcrisp@delmar.edu. For more news and information, visit Scripps Howard News Service (www.scrippsnews.com). | |
