How Far Should We Open Door When Death Knocks?

Few subjects are as fascinating as death. How can something with such a long track record still be seen as mysterious and frightful to some and as perfectly natural to others? Shouldn’t humankind have arrived at some kind of consensus by now?

Nothing points up our differences about the subject as much as the controversy surrounding Jack Kevorkian, good ol’ Dr. Death.

Although we’ve all read about Kevorkian’s physician-assisted suicides before, there was something about learning last week that he had helped an Orange County man commit suicide that brought the issue, to coin a phrase, closer to home.

It’s almost as if the Grim Reaper is moving this way.

How complicated is the issue of doctor-assisted deaths? I’m just one guy, and I’ve got two opinions about it.

The issue, as embodied in Proposition 161, the right-to-die initiative, lost in California last November. Statewide, it lost 54%-46%. In Orange County, where you’re led to believe individualism flourishes, it lost even bigger, 58%-42%.

I voted against 161, but don’t really oppose it philosophically. I voted no because I thought the issue was too important to possibly slide through in a year when everyone’s attention was focused on the races for President and U.S. Senate.

Bring the issue back in a year not dominated by other politics, and maybe I can finally make up my mind.

I know I’m not the only schizophrenic on the question of physician-assisted deaths.

Pat Kinlock faces the issue all the time as an administrator at Hoag Hospital. She sees the public’s ambivalence about it.

When it comes to Kevorkian, Kinlock shares the uncertainty. When you read about him, I asked her, do you see a potential menace or someone who’s just ahead of the curve?

“I see him both ways, actually,” she said. “Sometimes I think, ‘There he goes again,’ and other times I think maybe that’s really what the patient wants.”

As manager of patient relations, part of Kinlock’s job is asking patients whether they want to appoint someone to make decisions about life-support questions, should they become incapacitated.

It’s not hard to understand why people in wracking pain might want to die. What amazes me is people in that condition who want to keep living.

“I think on the whole, most people want to stay here as long as they can,” Kinlock said. “Even myself, I say I wouldn’t want to go through all this stuff (pain and extraordinary life-preserving methods), but if the choice were given, maybe I’m too nosy, maybe I’d want to know what’s going to be here tomorrow.”

Kinlock and her husband know the pain of terminal illness. Their 18-year-old daughter died in 1977 of cancer. They were united in their thinking that the treatment was almost worse than the disease.

So, when the physician-assisted death measure came to a vote in California last year, Kinlock voted for it. Interestingly, her husband voted against it.

“I just felt in favor because I see so many people who go through such a hard time and see them here and think, why, why are we doing that to them?” Her husband, she said, was troubled by the prospect that doctors would have too much power over life and death.

I don’t claim to be a seer, but I have a strong feeling that physician-assisted death will not be uncommon in the 21st Century. I can foresee clinics advertising the service, and future Kevorkians plying their trade relatively free of public condemnation.

Before that happens, though, we’ll all have to do more thinking about the business of death. Perhaps we’ve become so awe-struck in this century by medicine and modern science that we’ve forgotten that we’re supposed to be in control of our own lives.

If we’re in charge of our lives, why not our deaths?

But before looking too far forward, maybe it would be helpful to look back.

Kinlock tells this story: “I have an aunt in Stockton. Her mother-in-law is now going on to 105. She’s in a nursing care home and is just now starting to fail. You go in and talk to her and she says, ‘I’m just so tired of being here. . . . In the old days the doctor would give you something and let you go to sleep so you wouldn’t have to go on like this.”