AS IF WE
HAD THE CHOICE

A Widow Bit – July 27, 2008

By Mary Koch

            I didn’t think my driving was all that bad, but the two passengers in my car were discussing how they wanted to die. The one on my right said she wanted it to happen really fast, and as I pulled back on my speed, from the back seat we heard, “Oh, not me. I want a slow death, lingering in my bed while all my family gather around and tell me that they love me.”

            I thought about the African-American spiritual that my high school choir sang, “I want to die easy when I die.” At age 17, it was a fun, swingin’ tune to sing. At age 64, it’s more like a prayer.

            In Washington state, we’re likely to have a lot of these conversations in coming months. Last Friday Initiative 1000, called the “Death With Dignity” initiative, was certified for the November ballot. One hopes we could have a “campaign with dignity,” but the skeptic in me says that’s unlikely in this age of big dollar politics and hysterical sound bites. As of mid-July, the pro-campaign had raised well over a million bucks, much of it from out of state.

            I don’t know how I’ll vote. Arguments on both sides are compelling but not always accurate. Peg Sandeen, executive director of the Death With Dignity National Center, based in Portland, Ore., was quoted by the Vancouver (Wash.) Columbian: “Medical technology can keep people alive and alive and alive, and you can’t stay stop.”

            That’s not true. When it is technology keeping us alive, we have the right – as it is commonly and crassly described – to “pull the plug.” Too often that heavy decision falls to anguished spouses or children. We also have the right to avoid life-sustaining technology in the first place. One way is to sit down with your doctor and complete a form called Physician’s Orders for Life Sustaining Treatment (POLST).

            The primary advocate for the initiative is former Gov. Booth Gardner, who has Parkinson’s Disease. An in-depth article in the New York Times about Gardner’s probable last campaign left me with the feeling that family members wish he’d instead spend his waning years healing relationships.

            I have come to understand that my own death is at least as much about the people I’ll leave behind as it is about me. What matters is not how or when I die, but whether I’ll leave a legacy of broken relationships, anger and guilt.

            Besides my husband’s death, which was sudden and unexpected, I’ve twice had the sacred privilege of sitting with friends during their last hours of life following terrible illnesses. If this law had been in place, both would have been candidates for assisted suicide. Neither would have chosen that. Instead, they used every moment they were given to embrace life while teaching those of us around them a vital lesson: Just as we receive the gift of life, we can also receive – in God’s time – the grace to accept, with peace, our inevitable mortality.