The elite way to die
by digby
This story about Bill Keller and his wife’s crude and tone deaf public scribblings about how a total stranger should react to her struggle with cancer is simply stunning. Evidently a woman named Lisa Adams has been tweeting her experience dealing with metastatic cancer, partially for her own sake as well as an educational insight into how someone deals with such a challenge. She is a young person with three kids at home and is doing everything in her power to stay alive. This offended the Kellers who recently went through the illness and death of Mrs Keller’s elderly Dad, also from cancer. They seem to believe that Ms Adams is being a diva, not just for tweeting about her illness but for her desire to struggle against the disease to the very end. They advise that she should go gently into this good night instead — much as an elderly person who has reached the natural end of his life evidently. That these privileged jerks should even venture an opinion about how someone else should deal with a life-threatening illness reveals exactly what’s so wrong with our elites. It really is all about them — even how we should die.
I don’t know how I would face that challenge, but I do know that I would really like to be able to make that decision myself without jerks like the Kellers offering up advice about my bad manners in the way I choose to do it. Whether you want to use all means available and tweet about it or decide to eschew tratment and keep it all private — or anything else — it’s your choice, nobody else’s and certainly not Bill and Emma Keller’s, of all people.
Why these two would feel the need to air an opinion in public on this matter is beyond me. Why would they think that using their perches at the top of the media food chain to bully some poor woman who is dealing with a deadly disease is even slightly appropriate? It’s just bizarre.
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