A Case for Assisted Suicide

An old friend back in Indiana is now at the point where a needle in one arm provides the sustenance to keep him breathing and another gives him the morphine to keep him asleep. He’s been like that for more than a week. When I talk to his other friends in Indiana we often slip and refer to him in the past tense.

It’s been a painful few weeks. Less than a month ago, I made my last call to Ft. Wayne to talk to Freddie. It was one of several dozen conversations we shared over the past year. The first call was made because Trudy, his wife, asked me to. “Keith, could you call Freddie? He has just been diagnosed with cancer and really needs someone to cheer him up.”

Wow. Talk about a rough assignment. I didn’t want to make that call, but Freddie had been my friend for 55 years, and I couldn’t refuse. Happily, it turned out to be a piece of cake. We chatted about his illness. Then he remembered something funny we’d done and we laughed about it. The banter continued and, sure enough, I cheered him up just as Trudy asked. Better still, he cheered me up. Friends do that. We had so many wonderful memories that maudlin thoughts were crowded out of our minds.

Freddie was ill, no doubt about it. The doctors removed his bladder. That didn’t do it. He still had cancer in his lymph glands. The only option left was chemotherapy. That wouldn’t do. Freddie had seen a friend suffer horribly from the stuff. My old friend turned down the slim chance to gain a few months at the cost of excruciating pain.

As far as I could tell, he made the right choice. He was always upbeat and he managed to avoid slipping into despair like so many people facing death. He made a trip to Florida, a few excursions up to a gambling boat on Lake Michigan, and was even talking of traveling to Tucson for one last get-together with my wife and me.

Neither of us pussyfooted around the subject. He still had the cancer and nothing was going to stop it--nothing except a heart attack perhaps. He had one of them too, a big one. Fortunately he was with a friend who also had heart disease and carried nitroglycerin. He gave a pill to Freddie who lived to await the return of the cancer.

Later he told a mutual friend, “I wish that had done it for me. Ya know, I didn’t miss a thing in this old life. If I had it to do all over again I wouldn’t have changed a bit of it. I just don’t want to finish up a pathetic sick old man.”

Yet, that’s what he is doing. He spent something like three weeks in the hospital, the last week unconscious in intensive care. I called Trudy and tried to tell her, “If he wakes up, tell him I called.” Septuagenarian men aren’t supposed to cry but I didn’t make it. Trudy cried along with me and said, “I will.”

Both of us were sure he wouldn’t wake up, but I needed to say something. Everybody I talk to now is concerned for Trudy and the misery she’s going through with her husband of 30 years now merely a diapered breathing body. We wonder how much money she’ll have left after paying all the bills.

Now he’s home and still unconscious. If they discontinue the morphine he’ll wake up and scream until he dies. Or, they can sever a nerve and he might wake up without pain but he’d know he was paralyzed.

Despite all the flowery words on pretty get-well cards, and the high-flown religious sentiments, death seldom is dignified. Dr. Kevorkian has the answer. We will just have to recognize it.