RIP, Dr. Kavorkian

Suicide is so easy to mess up. Just ask me! I've failed every time. Dr. Kavorkian died this morning. He was an incorrigible Voice, and a hero of mine. I so well remember him in the days when he carried through what he believed in, against all public opinion, in defiance of all laws. He was the first in this country to acknowledge a terminally-ill person's desire to choose death as a human right. He paid a high price (and that's an understatement) for his actions based on his convictions: eight years locked up in prison. I know more now about prisons. They're stressful, violent environments. Inmates are minimally fed and abused by other inmates and prison officials.

Some say Kavorkian was the reason Hospice services became widely-used and acceptable. Right now, 43 states still have statutes criminalizing assisted suicide. But, due to Dr. Kavorkian's courageous efforts to raise consciousness, five states do not have laws criminalizing physician-assisted suicide, and two states openly permit physician-assisted suicide: Washington and Oregon. (Too bad their climates are so cold!) 

When Dr. Kavorkian's efforts to change our thinking about death were televised, I watched everything he was doing. I particularly remember watching his interview with the woman who was in the early stages of Alzheimer's, before she pushed the drip-switch. She said that she would soon be putting her blouse on backwards, and she didn't want to go into that confusion or put her family through that.

The laws still largely reflect what might be a majority opinion that while it is humane to euthanize suffering non-humans when their quality of life is over, humans have to lie in bed and decay to the smelly end. Sure, dying humans often get a little secret help at the end with overdoses of pain meds. No one ever admits it openly, so you might not know it, except for the phone call you receive from a close friend who, in between sobs, says something like my friend Carolyn said to me, "My husband died last night at midnight. He was in so much pain (he had cancer of the throat)! His doctor kept telling me to give him another pain suppository. I killed him!"

If you're wealthy, famous, respected by the public, considered sane, and terminally ill, you might have a physician at your bedside and/or a "stash," and be functioning enough to choose your time and way to die, as some believe Jackie Kennedy did when she was in the end-stage of non-Hodgkin lymphoma.

In February, I lay on the floor with my suffering Rottweiler Savannah and held her face in my hands. We looked in each others' eyes, and I told her how much I loved her while the vet injected the medication into her vein. When it was over, I told the vet that I wished my mother could have died this easily. 

Instead, my mother, age 90, who had suffered a stroke in the hospital and couldn't swallow, was evaluated by physicians, and reported to be unlikely to recover. I gave permission for her to be transported from the hospital to a Hospice house, where for 13 days, with a raging urinary tract infection, she "died with dignity." I begged them to give her an antibiotic to clear up the infection. They refused. I asked them to remove her catheter. They refused. Their whole aim was to "educate" me about how the dying must be cared for. They bathed her daily and turned her over on a schedule throughout the day. She groaned in pain when the nurses moved her. Three days before she died, a full week after she'd ceased moving on her own, or speaking, she managed to pull out her catheter in the middle of the night. This was all so unnecessary. 

Hospice, when all treatment for life has ended, is an acceptable way to die for people who have religious beliefs or superstitions against euthanization, but I have a better idea. I want to choose my own time and method of dying. What instructions can I give my loved ones in this choke-hold society to allow me to choose without them feeling guilty that they were responsible?

I appreciate what Dr. Kavorkian has done for us, but I would take that consciousness a step further and advocate for mentally ill people to be able to choose death, not just the terminally ill. Mental illness can be a life-long mental torture, with no cure. I've had times when I thought having my leg amputated with no anesthesia would be playtime compared to the mental anguish I was in. I've written end-notes to my family and friends, telling them that if they knew the pain I was in, they would want me to die. 

My friends told me that I loved my dog so much, I courageously chose a compassionate death for her. Do we love each other that much? Thank you for bringing us this far, Jack. We couldn't have gotten here without you. RIP.