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| WHOSE CHOICE? | |
 December 21, 1999 
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ANNE TAYLOR FLEMING: I remember back in junior high school when the first of my friends lost a father to a heart attack. It was so weird, so scary. We didn't talk about it. We didn't know what to say. It was way too early, our friend marked by some premature loss we could hardly imagine. We tried to be extra nice to her and go about our own young lives. That worked for quite a long time. Then came Vietnam, arguably the central drama of our generation. And yet again, most of us didn't personally know anyone who died there. SOLDIER: Bring me a stethoscope. SOLDIER: Right there, right there. ANNE TAYLOR FLEMING: We knew of them and were somehow connected to their deaths, horrified by them, but they, too, were foreign in a sense. Death happened over there, out of sight, to soldiers in war or bad guys on TV. It didn't happen to people you knew and loved. Somewhere in there, in the late 1960's, amid all the anti-war, pro-love bacchanalia, a startling book appeared that we all read for some class or another called "On Death and Dying," by Elizabeth Kubler Ross, the first close-up analysis of how people reckon with death. The stages-- denial, anger, depression, acceptance-- crept into our vocabulary of death even as we were yet to have it hit home. Then the gray crept into our hair and the first of our own parents began to die. They didn't just die, they lingered, while we lingered in hospital corridors, talking to specialists, trying to figure out the answers to all the old and new questions. What is the quality of life mean? When should we stop the extraordinary measures? How does my mother or father want to die? And who is responsible? Death became a perverse friend, a destination, a hospital waiting room full of stale coffee. It didn't just come and go. You got intimate with it, hung out with it in those antiseptic rooms for days, for weeks, and months at a time, tethered to the dying of your mother or your father as much as they were tethered to their machines. Some parents were open about it- - good-byes could be said, final jokes shared, life-sustaining therapies stopped, a parent brought home to die in his or her own bed. In other cases, there was a flailing denial till the end, leaving all and sundry bereft-- unresolved, unfarewelled, angry-- even years later, unfinished. At the same time, some of our own friends began to die, or to be dying, undergoing painful, invasive therapies, losing hair, clinging to life because of AIDS or breast cancer, their long struggles chronicled in print and on stage and on movie and TV screens. From "Ghost" to "Angels in America" - ACTOR: The kiss of the angel of death. ... ANNE TAYLOR FLEMING: -- To "N.Y.P.D. Blue," death became younger. We began to see it in the mirror. We tried to outrun it, out jog it, cheat it by swallowing vitamins and cholesterol busters, by embracing angels and ghosts, figments from the afterlife-- death as a pause button on the remote control. VIDEO CLIP: I, Thomas Youk, the undersigned - ANNE TAYLOR FLEMING: 30 years after Elizabeth Kubler Ross' book put the subject on the table, we finally seem to be taking it up in earnest, our hand forced by our own aging and by the provocations of dr. Jack Kevorkian, the macabre angel of mercy/publicity hound who is riding the death trend to ghoulish glory, going so far as to actually inject one terminally ill man with lethal drugs himself. Kevorkian pushed the metaphor, forced the question: How do you want to die, and whose decision is it? The answer is simple, complicated, of course, by all the new life-prolonging machines, but still essentially simple. It's most of all the decision of people who, at this moment, are themselves dying, near death now, even as another night dawns, the first stars visible through the hospital window. And it's the decision of those huddled there with them, seeing the night for a minute out the window, turning back, locating the strength to untether, now finally to let go. It's time. It's your decision. It's my decision. How well can we do it? I'm Anne Taylor Fleming. |
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