I don't want to be the guy who piggybacks off of such a phenomenal piece of writing, but exmearden's powerful personal FP diary reminded me to do something I've meant to do for some time: ask you to join or contribute to Compassion & Choices.
I've been supporting Compassion & Choices (formerly the Hemlock Society) for a few years now. Late last April, I was reminded why, when my mother got a terrible backache that turned out to be a tumor on her spine caused by advanced lung cancer.
My mother is fighting this cancer with everything she has, enduring six rounds of chemo (so far) and radiation five days a week. I've been staying with her for the last two weeks (I head home later today), and the woman who raised me and my sister, who played a frenetic "Fur Elise" on the piano, who ran the PTA for years, who never once let any of her children (the two biological ones, the two in-laws, and the various strays she picked up over the years) down in any way--she's aged at least a decade in the last year.
It's incredibly hard seeing her like this (I can only imagine what my dad has been going through during this ordeal), but as long as she's willing and able to fight, I'm going to do everything I can to help her.
But if someday she should decide that she's sick of fighting, and wants to pass on with dignity and peace, I want her to be able to transition in a way that is both dignified and peaceful. I would want no less for myself, or my father, or my wife, or my sister.
I would hope, especially following the tragedy of Terri Schiavo, that we all recognize the importance of living wills and assigning durable power-of-attorney to someone capable of carrying out our last wishes (in my typically romantic fashion, I took my wife to sign a living will with me on our honeymoon). I spent ten years watching as my grandfather very, very slowly died from the fatal stroke that should have killed him in a matter of hours, all because of an ineffectively worded living will. After his stroke took his ability to speak and write, the only way he could communicate with us, to show he recognized visitors or understood when we were leaving, was to sob uncontrollably. I wouldn't wish that existence on anyone. To be conscious of being trapped in one's own body seems like a more excessive sentence than anyone should be forced to endure. When my grandmother on the other side suffered from a fatal stroke, I breathed only two sighs of relief after the initial event: first, when she was placed in hospice care at a fine facility full of sensitive and compassionate people in accordance with her wishes; second, when fifteen minutes after I left her bedside to drive home to my parents, she peacefully fell asleep and never awoke.
There are worse things than when a loved one dies.
For many people suffering from terminal or chronic and painful illness, the inherent value of life is outweighed by the weight of their suffering, and allowing them to end that suffering is no sin, but the height of compassion. That's the same basic principle allows us to maintain hospice facilities, and that was recognized when the Supreme Court affirmed the right of individuals to refuse life-saving medical treatment. But for some reason, we've arbitrarily drawn the line at allowing people to hasten the inevitable, while condoning practices like hospice that still allow them to establish inevitability.
We need to establish processes by which those whose wishes are clear and whose lives are no longer valuable to them may, with the help of a properly trained physician, expedite their deaths. While I am eternally grateful to the hospice workers who cared for my grandmother during her last two weeks on this earth (especially since this came right around the time that Randall Terry and his ill-bred ilk were attacking hospice care as murder), my grandmother went to hospice to die. I don't see why that death had to come from dehydration over the course of two weeks instead of pentobarbital injected carefully by a physician, if the latter had been her wish.
I know that many people believe that the difference between allowing someone to die and aiding them in dying is so great that one should be permitted while the other outlawed. But for me, I see the individual as sovereign over her own body. We don't allow one person to own another or force another into personal service, and we don't allow the state to seize someone's life or liberty unless she's forfeited them through her own actions. Yet we allow the state to tell us that we can't seize that final moment and claim it as our own: to stare Death and Pestilence straight on and say "I leave on my own terms." I find these facts to conflict with each other, and I choose to side with personal liberty over weak state interests in prolonging suffering.
So please, if you have $45, become a member of Compassion & Choices or a similar group. If you don't have that much to spare, please still make a contribution to C & C or the end-of-life group of your choice. And hell, if you think I'm full of it and that the current system is A-OK, please at least send some love to your local non-profit hospice care center, because they need our help, too.
P.S.: right now, only 3 states allow physicians to assist patients in ending their lives. Oregon and Washington both passed voter-backed assisted suicide laws, and less than two weeks ago Montana's supreme court held that state law doesn't prohibit the practice, making it legal for residents to seek end-of-life assistance. The victory in Montana, being recent and court-imposed, is likely to come under fire soon. We need to make sure we don't backslide, and can build on our successes.