For Ex-Governor Who Advocates Right to Die, Political Is Personal

“What do you do for exercise?” asks Booth Gardner, and it’s not long before the 69-year-old former governor of Washington is sharing tales of marathons run and mountains climbed.

But soon this lanky, bearded man with a trademark gruff style turns to his latest and perhaps last campaign, one that has abruptly put him back in the public eye and to which he brings a perspective full of both psychic and physical pain.

Gardner is campaigning for the right to die.

It’s not quite that simple, of course. Anyone can die -- “I could go out in the garage and blow my brains out, but that’s not what I’m talking about,” says Gardner, who describes his body and spirit as progressively weakened by Parkinson’s disease, with which he was diagnosed 13 years ago. “That’s not dignity.”

A recent U.S. Supreme Court decision upheld Oregon’s assisted-suicide law, and neighboring Washington is one of many states (as is California) where lawmakers or voters will consider the issue.

Oregon, the first and only state with such a provision, allows terminally ill patients to receive a drug prescription to hasten death.

A two-term Democratic governor (1985 to 1993), Gardner, who was diagnosed shortly after he left office, lends high-profile and personal support to the drive for right-to-die legislation.

Advocates in his state say they hope to bring the issue before voters with an initiative in 2007 or 2008; opponents vow a vigorous campaign against it.

But contentious as the issue is, Gardner’s circumstances may add even more fuel to the debate.

For one thing, he explains, he thinks the Oregon law doesn’t go far enough.

Oregon’s requirement -- that a person must receive a prognosis from two doctors that he or she has six months or less left to live -- might never apply to a person in his condition. Parkinson’s, although it can be progressively debilitating, is generally not fatal.

“I have this little game I’m playing: Do I die of Parkinson’s or old age?” Gardner says at the 6th Avenue Bar & Grill, a downtown hangout.

“I’m old age. Parkinson’s is Parkinson’s,” he says. “I want to win.

“But still I can see, foreseeably, that Parkinson’s can take me down to the point where I can’t be functional anymore. And I’ve had a great life.... So when I can no longer enjoy that life and I don’t see how I can contribute, and I’m a worry to my kids and wife, then I want to go.”

Parkinson’s, says Gardner, “ravages your soul” as it erodes the ability to walk or even to move the muscles needed to talk. And his life is a mix of bad (“off”) and good (“on”) periods.

“Being ‘off’ is the worst thing I’ve ever been through. I can’t talk. I shuffle, or I can’t stand up at all. I’m ‘on’ now, so I have no trouble talking to you. But if my downtime increases and my ‘on’ time decreases, I’ll reach a point where the quality of life isn’t worth it.

“I’ve made all the tough decisions in my life,” such as school and politics, marriage and divorce, he says. “I have the right to make the last decision.”

But even advocates of medically assisted suicide say they would not back a law more open-ended than Oregon’s.

“I don’t think we would ever support anything that extended to people who were not terminally medically ill,” says Barbara Coombs Lee, president of Compassion & Choices, a nonprofit group with offices in Portland, Ore., and Denver. “It’s too ambiguous to enforce.”

In another way, Gardner concedes, his case underlines the moral complexities of the issue: Even those closest to him are deeply split.

As he puts it: “My wife is supportive, my daughter is supportive. My son is a Christian, a born-again Christian.”

Gardner offers a half-laugh at how that comes out. Not a churchgoer himself, he says, he deeply respects his son Doug’s religious perspective.

Doug, a delegate to the 2004 Republican convention, says he opposes legally sanctioned suicide because society should “err on the side of life.” As to whether he would be in the room if his father chose to take his life, he said that was “a private family matter” he preferred not to discuss.

And, of course, it may never come to that. In Oregon, though physician-assisted suicide is widely discussed and legally available, about 30 people a year, on average, have used it in the eight years since the law took effect.

Like a lot of healthy people, Gardner says, he never gave much thought to his own death when he was a star in politics.

In 1991, there was an initiative on Washington’s ballot to legalize assisted suicide. But not only did he not take a public position on it, Gardner says he can’t even recall how he voted on it. (The measure was defeated.)

“I haven’t the slightest idea. I was thinking about life, not death.”

Looking back, he says, the change may have begun in his last year as governor. He was “depressed beyond belief” in that time, he says.

“I like conflict; it spices up my life. And I like making decisions.... I didn’t make a decision my last year as governor. I avoided decisions. I avoided conflicts.”

Gardner accepted an ambassadorial position in Geneva from President Clinton, as U.S. delegate to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. Gardner calls GATT “the General Agreement to Talk and Talk” and says he was unhappy in the diplomatic life.

He also knew something was physically wrong. He was so stiff “I was like the Tin Man walking,” he recalls. He went to a doctor in Geneva.

“He asked me to walk up and down the hallway,” says Gardner. “Then he tells me, ‘We’ve been together 10, 15 minutes, and you’ve neither blinked nor changed facial expression.’ ”

“So?” Gardner told the doctor.

“That means you have Parkinson’s,” the doctor said bluntly.

That quick diagnosis was confirmed when Gardner returned to Seattle. Medication helped alleviate the Parkinson’s symptoms, and antidepressants helped lift his mood.

Divorced after 35 years of marriage, he wed a Texas native he had met in Geneva. In time, he went public with his disease and helped raise funds to fight it, helping to establish the Booth Gardner Parkinson’s Care Center at Evergreen Hospital Medical Center in Kirkland, across Lake Washington from Seattle.

Gardner says depression is a periodic demon in his life, but he says it is not playing a role in his new campaign.

“I’m not trying to open the door for people that are 60 years old and depressed because their wife left them after 35 years or something,” he says. “Not at all.”

He says he wants “to be in the position where -- on a Sunday afternoon, in the summertime; this is the ideal -- I’m with my kids and grandkids and I say to them, ‘Come here, I’ve got to talk to you.’

“And they come and I say: ‘Friday’s my day. That’s when I want to leave. Let’s spend the rest of the week hanging by each other.’

“That’s dignity.”