Cruel and unusual punishment just for dying
by David Atkins
Reading stories like this makes me want to destroy random inanimate objects:
“My husband has repeatedly asked me to give him a gun, he has asked me to shoot him, and he repeatedly begs to die.”
This came to me Wednesday afternoon in an email from a Northern California woman.
“All I can do is give him the prescribed doses of morphine provided and hope it’s enough to enable him to let go,” said Sandy Wester, whose 71-year-old husband, Donald — Donnie she called him — was in hospice care, with cancer spreading through his body. His dignity was gone, he had many of the same needs as an infant, and the long days brought nothing but anguish.
Wester wrote to say she had followed my accounts of my father’s death and was incensed by my July 22 column about the arrest of an 87-year-old Palm Springs man. Bill Bentinck was locked up for three days on suspicion of murder after his terminally ill wife removed her nasal oxygen catheter to speed death along. Bentinck, who quietly allowed her to pass, was held on $1-million bail but was later released without charges.
I called Wester as soon as I got the email, and she described the scene playing out in her cabin in the Sierra foothills. Donnie, who hadn’t eaten in days, was trying to lift himself off the bed, angry that death was making him wait so long.
“He’s flipping a chair,” Sandy said, describing a light, plastic lawn chair next to the bed. “He’s saying, ‘Why can’t I just die?'”
Why not, indeed? Where is the concern for “liberty” we so often hear from the right wing in cases like these?
Donnie’s line, according to Sandy, was that he wanted to wake up dead, meaning that if physician-assisted death wasn’t possible, he wanted to die in his sleep. Weeks of misery at the end of a good life “was not the way he wanted to go, and I think we need to have more control over the dying process,” Sandy said.
“My God,” said Sandy’s friend Sue, “we put our dogs down because they’ve got a terminal illness or can’t breathe or walk or whatever. But we make a human being … suffer.”
Sandy said Donnie had recently backed off his requests that she go fetch a pistol, but only because he didn’t want her to have to “clean him up.”
On Wednesday night, he fell out of bed and the fire department came to help Sandy lift him. On Thursday morning, he was barely hanging on.
“At 5:30, he laid there and that’s when the horrible breathing started,” she said of the death rattle that often signals the end is near. “And then it got worse. Oh my God, it was horrible.”
She used the word “barbaric” to describe the way Donnie died, and it’s not the first time I’ve heard that very description from a Californian wondering why we don’t have the same end-of-life options that residents of Oregon, Washington and Montana do. The answer is that religious organizations — chief among them the Catholic Church — and some medical associations have derailed such efforts in the past.
Revolting. Conservatism in all its forms, but especially in its most backward social forms, is responsible for untold misery and suffering. If only the eternity of suffering truly awaited them in equal exchange for the pain they cause others.
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