We All Die a Bit Daily, but Counselor Eases Final Steps

The hopeless seek out Caroline Youngquist. They call and they stop by: AIDS patients, the disabled, the old and ailing.

She can offer them no miracle medicines or cures of faith. Nor does she want to.

For these people, Youngquist believes, it is time to die. So she endeavors to help them do so. With dignity.

“It takes a hell of a lot of courage to take your own life,” Youngquist says, staring me straight in the eye. “I hope that when my time comes, I’ll have the courage to take my own.”

Caroline Youngquist, 79, full of fire and warmth, is Orange County’s volunteer representative for the Hemlock Society, a right-to-die organization that hopes one day to legalize doctor-assisted suicide for the terminally ill.

Although she stresses that she has not directly assisted in anyone’s death, a felony under California law, Youngquist refers people to literature that outlines, in precise detail, how they may painlessly take their own lives.

She believes that many have.

“So many people come here,” she says with a wave of her arm toward the living room of her Leisure World townhouse. “These people are usually perfect strangers, from around here, Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego, Corona. We talk, and then, I forget about them. It’s better that way. We protect ourselves.”

Sometimes, she says, it is the ill who ask for her help; other times, those who cannot stand to see them suffer.

“I do have people who come back and call,” she says. “They are very grateful.”

The truth is that I was rather astounded by what Youngquist told me when I visited her the other day. This strong woman with the oversize glasses and the fringe of white hair gave me unadorned talk about euthanasia: what some call murder, others compassion.

I had expected polemics, perhaps some stridency. But to Youngquist, the issue is starkly simple and supremely private. She and others have the right to die quickly and without pain. They will do so.

To that end, Youngquist distributes durable power of attorney forms, a legal document that allows patients to direct their own medical care, and copies of “Let Me Die Before I Wake,” a guide to “self-deliverance” written by Hemlock Society founder Derek Humphry.

“Oh, there is a very good way of taking your own life,” Youngquist tells me while leafing through the Hemlock Society newsletters and right-to-die books that she has stacked on the dining room table. “And here it is.”

With that she hands me a drug dosage table, published by the Hemlock Society with the printed admonishment to “keep this document in a secure, private place,” and then asks me to please keep this information to myself.

“I feel very sorry for them,” she says of those who come to share their pain. “I’ve suffered myself. That’s why I can help.”

Youngquist acknowledges that hers is a position many do not share. Some object to the idea of a physician taking a life, others call suicide a sin and still others worry that the old and disabled could feel pressured to die.

“I certainly feel no pressure whatsoever,” Youngquist says. “If I find out I have cancer, for example, I don’t want to go through the chemotherapy, the hospitals, all that, not at my age.

“A lot of people do go through with it (treatment). They live six months, or five years, more. I don’t want to do that. It’s time to call it a life.

“This is not a sin. It’s more of a sin for the hospital and doctors to keep people alive artificially. In the good old days, my mother, my grandmother, they got sick and they died. Today they keep people alive artificially. Every day, there are people who are begging to die. . . .

“Everybody here in Leisure World should be a member (of the Hemlock Society), for heaven’s sake.”

As it is, Youngquist says 6,500 Leisure World residents signed a petition to place an initiative on the ballot in 1988 that would legalize doctor-assisted suicide for the terminally ill. She says that number would surely have been higher if organizers had had the money to hire professional signature gatherers.

Statewide, the initiative failed to qualify after proponents collected fewer than than half the required signatures. A coalition has formed to place the renamed Death with Dignity Act on the ballot in 1992.

So until then, Youngquist says, she will try to stay off the soapbox. The Hemlock Society has no formal meetings in Orange County--”we have enough organizations in Leisure World”--and besides, she’s busy enough with everything else.

She is an accomplished, self-taught sculptor. She has friends and male companions--”I think it’s foolish for someone my age to get married again”--and a home that stands as a testament to her vitality.

In March, she installed a parquet floor in her entryway--”The trouble with you young people is you don’t know the joy of doing things for yourself”--and after that, she knocked out a wall in the upstairs bedroom to let in more light.

Hanging in the kitchen is the gold key that Weight Watchers recently gave her in exchange for losing 22 pounds.

Youngquist, who has survived three husbands, asks me not to mention her age--”I had a boyfriend who was 12 years younger than me, and he thought we were the same age”--but later she says she supposes it really wouldn’t matter.

“No, I don’t like old age,” she says, running her fingers through her hair. “I look in the mirror and I think, ‘Dear God, I look terrible.’ But . . . what are you going to do? There ain’t no golden years.”