When the Lights are Down Low

We were sitting around the patio savoring the last warm memory of daylight, watching God’s pastels streak the sky with glory, when someone said, “How do you feel about the right to die?”

The question came with the suddenness of an exploding beer can and caused us all to turn away from the redeeming sunset and observe the man with a mixture of shock and curiosity.

“What a strange question,” one of the guests said.

“We’re sitting here at peace with the world, basking in serenity, comfortable with eternity and you start talking about death,” another said.

“I’m tired of the whole subject,” a third added, “and I’ve been tired of it ever since what’s-his-name began killing people.”

It was a moment of modern Americana that Norman Rockwell might have painted were he alive today and possibly a little mad. In his time they didn’t sit around discussing the right to die or the moral dilemma of doctor-assisted suicide. They just died when they had to and that was that.

It’s different now. If you can visualize that patio moment on an evening as sweet and warm as honey in tea with a bunch of people talking about death you’ll have some idea of what a lot of Americans are talking about today.

After the initial reaction to the question, the group went silent as pastels washed from the west and twilight lay over us like a bridal veil. Then the guy who’d asked the question in the first place said almost wistfully, “I want to be asleep when the lights go out.”

*

His approach to the question probably could have been a little more subtle but I understood the man’s connections. He was watching all that glory on the horizon and began wondering if heaven was that pretty. Then heaven segued into death and death into dying and dying into pain and pain into suicide.

I wasn’t among those on the patio who leaned away from the subject. I’ve been pondering it for a long time, months before the recent Supreme Court ruling that upheld a state’s right to ban doctor-assisted suicide.

I thought about it during the Korean War when a prisoner, badly wounded and in excruciating pain, kept begging our hospital corpsman to kill him. I thought about it watching my brother-in-law die in agony. I thought about it when Jack Kevorkian, that strange little man, began doing his thing.

Months ago I spent an hour with Sharon Valente, a “suicidologist” who teaches at USC. A pleasant, caring person, she’s been concerned with the subject for 15 years and still doesn’t really know how she feels about allowing anyone, doctors included, to kill people, no matter how badly a patient might want to die.

“Who would determine if quality of life is gone?” she asked. “A wife? A priest? The courts? The head of a medical team? What is quality of life? There are so many unanswered questions.”

Then I read a book by David Kessler, another expert on the subject, called “The Rights of the Dying.” It’s a beautifully written piece of work that ponders with compassion what to do when, to paraphrase the guy on the patio, the lights are about to go out. The book celebrates life even as it considers death and ends up saying how we die is pretty much up to us.

*

We discussed death on the patio until stars pierced the twilight and darkness embraced us like a mother.

I came away no more enlightened than I’d been, but I’ve got to tell you I’m in love with life like no other guy in the whole history of time. And I don’t see it as a fragile commodity to be treated like teacups in a queen’s kitchen.

Life is a howling, thundering, flashing force of God and nature that demands to exist even in the most terrifying moments. Survival is both life’s thrust and its instinct, and how one deals with the last moments of a fading light is a question those of us on the patio are ill-equipped to answer.

On the night before I underwent a double bypass I lay in the darkness and considered the possibility of dying and discovered I wasn’t particularly afraid. I saw death as an unbelievable lightness, a feather tended by starry breezes, and I went to the table at peace with myself.

Where does that leave me in the debate that won’t go away relative to our right to die? Undecided. Like any right, once granted it is bound to be abused. Pornographers scurry like rats in the shadows of the 1st Amendment and crazies arm for Armageddon in the shadows of the 2nd.

We’ve got a lot of talking to do on the patio, watching the glory fade to night, before I’m ready to decide exactly how we’re supposed to die.

Al Martinez can be reached online at al.martinez@latimes.com