Mother’s Wish to Die Leaves Man in Legal Limbo : Euthanasia: With her son at her side, pain-racked Alice Marks, 81, took an overdose. Paramedics revived her, and he may face criminal charges. Case sparks wide interest as state lawmakers consider reopening assisted-suicide debate.

The pain was like another person, a constant companion to Alice Marks, who thought she had led a good life and deserved better than this graceless escort for her exit.

Unable to eat or sleep, Marks decided she could endure the ravages of degenerative bone disease no longer. With her 51-year-old son, Christopher, at her side, holding her and saying he loved her, she injected herself last month with a massive overdose of morphine.

After a time, her eyes stared emptily into space, and Christopher Marks called police to say that his mother was gone.

In fact, she was unconscious. Paramedics rushed to the scene, discovered a heartbeat and revived her.

Eight weeks later, her son faces the prospect of a grand jury indictment on a charge of violating California’s law against assisted suicide.

The case has sparked wide interest not only in Orange County, where a substantial population of senior citizens and AIDS patients tends to be passionate about long-term health care issues, but in Sacramento, where the state Assembly could be ready to resurrect California’s role in the national and international right-to-die debate.

Two years ago, California nearly became the first place in the world to explicitly legalize doctor-assisted suicide and euthanasia. But 54% of the state’s voters rejected Proposition 161, sometimes called the “Death With Dignity Act.”

Ultimately, the Netherlands enacted a law similar to the California proposition and Oregon became the first state to legalize purposeful death in extreme cases, as voters narrowly approved Measure 16 in November.

Now, while the Orange County district attorney’s office contemplates whether to seek criminal charges against Christopher Marks, California’s state legislators may soon have a mirror image of the Oregon law before them.

Hearings on Assembly Bill 1080 were scheduled to start recently, but last-minute skirmishes about some provisions delayed the hearings indefinitely, according to the bill’s sponsor, Assemblywoman Diane Martinez (D-Monterey Park).

When legislators take up the issue again, 81-year-old Alice Marks would dearly love to address them.

“It should never have been this way,” she rasped from her hospital bed last week. “I had made a decision and thought it out very carefully. . . . I think we should have that much freedom in this world.”

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Though Alice Marks holds a master’s degree in counseling from UC Berkeley, she made a lifelong career of raising her three sons. She was a classic mother, Christopher Marks said, cut from the Donna Reed mold. He still recalls her waiting for him every day when he came home from school.

Widowed 25 years, her children grown, she continued to lead a spry, independent and happy existence, devoted mainly to her grandchildren, until a chronic arthritic condition worsened in 1992.

Walking became agony, climbing stairs was impossible. In time, her back literally crumbled.

Mentally, she’s as sharp as ever, said Christopher Marks, a Fullerton real estate executive.

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When surgery, pills and pain clinics failed her, his mother needed to lean on him. Reluctantly, she moved into the Fullerton house he shared with his girlfriend in 1993, and he paid someone to care for her while he was at work.

Then, this past February, Alice Marks fell and broke her hip. For years she had lamented the declining quality of her life; now she told her son she longed for the end.

He said he could not help her decide to die. He did not want to spend the rest of his life thinking he had rushed his mother’s final day.

“What I had always said to her when she talked to me about it was that I can’t encourage you, I can’t assist you, but I can support you. I can’t talk to you about the time, or anything. It wasn’t a legal thing, in my mind. It was a moral thing. I said, ‘When you’re ready, when you want to do it, you just have to let me know.’ ”

At the end of February, bedridden and weighing 70 pounds, she told him: “I’m ready.” Dutifully, he gathered family members at her bedside to say goodby.

“It was a teary thing,” he said. “But it wasn’t a negative thing, because every one of these people had seen the terrible pain she was in.”

The next morning was March 1. As he did every morning, Christopher Marks filled six or seven syringes with morphine and laid them out for his mother. But instead of injecting herself throughout the day, as her pain dictated, she administered what she hoped would be a lethal dose.

“I just sat in the bed and held her,” Christopher Marks said, adding: “We talked, and it was an expression of love between the two of us.”

After 20 minutes, she appeared to have stopped breathing.

“Not being sophisticated in these matters, it looked to me as if she was dying,” Christopher Marks said. Another hour passed. He felt sad but relieved.

He called the paramedics. “They came and found a heartbeat, gave her a shot and woke her up,” he said. “She was not happy.”

Christopher Marks, however, was overjoyed. “She was the most beautiful person I ever saw in my life,” he said.

He said the child in him, the boy who couldn’t bear the thought of losing his mother, celebrated the paramedics’ efforts.

Once she was revived, life quickly became more hellish than ever for Alice Marks. She was removed to St. Jude Medical Center in Fullerton, where Christopher Marks said the nurses refused to give his mother morphine, to which she was addicted.

“They cold-turkeyed her off the morphine,” Christopher Marks said. “Now she has complete pain and no morphine, because they wanted to protect themselves.”

St. Jude officials refused to comment about Alice Marks or her treatment.

Fullerton police detectives, meanwhile, gave Christopher Marks a phone number for the Orange County deputy district attorney in charge of elder abuse.

After years of catering to his mother’s every need, Christopher Marks was astonished.

“Just to assign it to that person freaked me out,” he said. “You have to understand, I’m a person who believes in the system, aside from all this, and if I were in any one of these people’s positions, I’d be reacting the same as they are.”

Deputy Dist. Atty. Sheila Hanson, who handles elder abuse cases, said she has not yet decided how to proceed against Christopher Marks.

“All the police reports have been submitted to me,” she said. “Currently it’s being evaluated by myself, and we’re making a determination as to whether criminal charges will be filed.”

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Alice Marks was later transferred to a locked psychiatric ward at Fountain Valley Regional Hospital. Christopher Marks and his lawyer, Jennifer Keller, said she was hospitalized against her will because a psychiatric exam deemed her a danger to herself. For weeks she had no TV or telephone, and all her visits were closely supervised, Christopher Marks said.

A Fountain Valley hospital spokeswoman declined to comment on the case because of rules governing patient confidentiality, but she said Alice Marks has been transferred to a less restrictive unit of the hospital.

Keller said a recent meeting of officials to determine Alice Marks’ fate was punctuated by her pleas for pain medication.

“She was begging for shots,” said Keller, who believes Orange County officials are loath to enforce California’s assisted suicide law, which was written in 1873.

The law, which Keller said has not been amended since 1905, makes a person who “deliberately aids or advises or encourages another to commit suicide” subject to felony charges.

From her hospital bed, Alice Marks railed against police and hospital officials, calling it an “insult” that her son is being held in legal limbo for being courageous.

“You don’t plan them like that,” she said of her son, her voice weak but proud. “It’s terrible what they’re putting him through, making him out to be some sort of criminal.”

Supporters of California’s new assisted-suicide bill, and even its critics, say Christopher Marks is one of countless Americans caught each day in an ethical void, between advancements in prolonging life and lagging attempts to enhance it.

Still, California’s proposed law might not protect him, or please his mother.

“The law that’s in front of California would not have helped Alice Marks,” said Derek Humphry, founder of the pro-euthanasia Hemlock Society and author of “Final Exit,” a how-to manual for terminally ill patients who wish to commit suicide. “She was suffering from what I call ‘terminal old age,’ and it’s a pitiful state. It’s a terrible situation to be in.”

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But it is not a plight addressed by the bill now facing the Assembly, or by the Oregon measure. Such laws merely allow doctors to help quicken the death of anguished patients who have fewer than six months to live.

Still, Humphry and others said, the California bill is a start.

“It’s better than nothing,” said Irene Shannon, who heads the Hemlock Society’s Orange County chapter.

The Marks case and others, Shannon said, keep the national spotlight trained on the assisted-suicide controversy, while helping Hemlock Society supporters pressure state legislators and widen their support base.

Shannon, who said the Hemlock Society has declared this week national Death with Dignity Week, said the group has been deluged by phone calls from people who support Alice Marks. Shannon hopes California--the first state to legalize a patient’s right to refuse life-prolonging treatment through “living wills”--is regaining its role as a leader in the right-to-die movement.

A judge has blocked Oregon’s measure from taking effect until a court decides if it is constitutional.

Humphry said he is encouraged that 12 states besides California have considered adopting legislation like Oregon’s in the last few months.

Most of those states have decided to reject the Oregon model, however, with California among the few still weighing it. And even California appears to be approaching its second right-to-die debate in two years warily.

Organized opposition to an assisted-suicide law in California comes from the California Medical Assn. and the Roman Catholic Church, both of which battled Proposition 161.

“I have sympathy for people that bring these issues to legislation,” said Dr. Melvyn Sterling, a trustee of the state medical association and the chairman of a UC Irvine task force on death and dying. “But I continue to have reservations about the safety precautions.”

Sterling warned that if Oregon’s measure spawns a spate of similar laws throughout the nation, the medical community will lose its incentive to enhance the quality of life for terminally ill patients.

“I have grave concerns about the side effects of putting physicians in the role of facilitating someone’s death,” he said. “I use opiates in enormous doses to relieve pain, and there’s almost nothing that will deter me in my pursuit of relief of pain. In the Marks case, (the issue is) how do we relieve the pain, what do we need to do to relieve suffering, without making physicians party to someone’s death?”

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Msgr. Larry J. Baird, a spokesman for the Diocese of Orange County, said the church will resist any attempt to legalize assisted suicide, for theological as well as practical reasons.

The church teaches that suicide is “intrinsically evil,” he said.

“The Catholic moral theology has always taught that only God gives life and only God can take away life,” Baird said. “Physicians, doctors are to be healers. They’re not people to become surrogate killers.”

Oddly enough, as he awaits the district attorney’s decision, Christopher Marks said he does not entirely disagree with Baird. He simply wishes for his mother to find some measure of peace.

“I’m not sure I believe in assisted suicide,” he said, seated at a desk in his office that is covered with family photos. “There’s too many bad guys around and too much gray area.

“But I believe you should be able to be with somebody, I should be able to sit with my mom, hold her and tell her I love her, while she’s injecting herself, and not have that be a crime. “