|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
High resolutionBelltown images on our Flickr page!  Delicious City Food Blog  Send your Belltown-related YouTubes to MyBelltown.com |
feature
BOB OSWALD witnesses the fight for a dignified demise No One Dies In Pain, No One Dies Alone 
Robb Miller, Executive Director of Compassion & Choices of Washington, at the office. Spoiler alert: You are going to die. But enough about You (actually, I'm not done with You yet, but we'll get back to that), let's talk about Compassion and Choices, because the timing and the cause are both good. Compassion and Choices of Washington's office space is a series of oddly-shaped and disparately-sized rooms, labyrinthine in their complexity despite there only being about three of them. They are housed behind shiny black doors on the third floor of the same building on Denny Way that houses Zeek's Pizza. As if that didn't make them awesome enough, they promote end-of-life options, providing services and advocating for the terminally ill. Free of charge. And while the majority of their work involves helping people plan for the end of their lives, complete "Advance Directives" (instructions for care in case of emergency, Do Not Resuscitate orders, Durable Power Of Attorney forms and the like), and otherwise advocate for those who are near death, Compassion and Choices' most controversial work (the work this article will be about) surrounds something you may have just signed a petition for: Initiative 1000, which would make it legal for terminally ill, mentally competent adults in Washington to end their own lives using medications prescribed by a doctor. Sounds great. But sure, we've got the city in our pocket, and probably some of the more civilized tribes of Bellevue and Issaquah, but I had strong doubts this would fly in the hinterland. Not so, says Robb Miller, C&C Washington's executive director; levels of support are close to 70 percent across the board. "Democrats support this. Republicans support this. If you look at the Catholic Church [one of the more outspoken critics of similar legislation] the laity are with us. It's the hierarchy that's opposing it." Given Washington's trend toward libertarianism (not libertinism, although we've got that too), progressive politics on the coast (and, to be fair, sometimes elsewhere), as well as our proximity to Oregon, it makes sense. Proximity to Oregon? Since when did that make a difference? Since 1997, when the nation's first Aid-In-Dying act went into effect in that state. Yeah, in 1994, Oregon became the first state in the nation to pass legislation allowing people to decide when they want to die. And we're not talking Jack Kevorkian here; the Oregon law only permits those terminally ill patients who pass through a gauntlet of legal requirements, to acquire and administer a fatal dose of medication to themselves. Pretty tame stuff, considering you can achieve the same results with a gun or a length of rope if you've still got the strength and intention... laws like this just allow you to do it in a managed, dignified way that won't traumatize your family and landlord after he comes to check on you when you haven't paid rent in three months. Simple idea: A clean, painless death for people who certainly about to die a painful, messy one. To give you a clue as to how powerful the forces that oppose this idea are, it took three years of infighting, legal and otherwise, for Oregon's law to go into effect. Powerful forces? Oh, you know. The usual "small government except when people are doing something I don't like" crowd. People who would like to believe they are not going to die, and would prefer that no one talk about it, ever. And the aforementioned church hierarchy. Apparently, God and His (largely self-appointed) representatives don't like it when people make decisions for themselves, and they especially don't like it when people use technology to opt out of needless suffering. Know anything about chronic pain care? In case you didn't: if you, as an American, happen to suffer an injury which causes you to be in severe pain for the rest of your life, few doctors will be brave enough to prescribe you enough medicine to keep your sorry ass functional BECAUSE EVIL JUNKIES SNORTING THE OXYCONTIN CAUSE THE DOWNFALL OF SOCIETY! Dying in pain and living in pain are basically the same issue. It only takes a marginal coherence to be more eloquent, pithy, and succinct on an issue than me, so Robb manages it effortlessly: "Terminally ill patients as well as those with chronic pain are both collateral victims in the War on Drugs." Hey, who isn't, right? I was doped to the gills on dangerous substances for the majority of my young life and if I want to go out that way I'm reserving that right too. But seriously: The people who qualify for help under 1000 are not thrill-seeking ravers. They are terminally ill. They ain't getting better. There's not much palliative care can do for them beside put them on a morphine drip or into a coma until they "naturally" pass on. This is not an issue about the morality of drug use and whether you're a Bad Enough Dude to waste away with inoperable cancer for three or five or ten months. The people who are saying you've got to live the last days of your life in agony are the same people who say the federal government should regulate what consenting adults do in their own bedrooms, and that the "right to life" of a cluster of cells without a nervous system is more important than the right of an adult woman to her own health and autonomy. We know these people; they walk among us. But this time there's a twist. Robb is careful with his words when he describes the groups that represent the disabled. "People with disabilities have the same opinions as the rest of us. They want this option to be available to them if they become terminally ill. If you follow the money and see where the funds are coming from, it will be large, well-financed religious organizations." The fear that disabled people will use this law as a convenient way to end their disability-despite being incredibly condescending-is simply irrational. It hasn't happened in Oregon. The will to live is strong, and people aren't signing up for this thing just for the rush. Once again, we're talking about our grandparents, our parents, and, coming soon to a theater near us... us. Rational actors, all. "And about one third of the people who do receive Aid In Dying don't use it," Robb adds. They go through the entire arduous process of oral and written requests, videotapes, witnesses, and then they die on their own. "They apply for it and keep it around for peace of mind, and so they can maintain autonomy, but they don't use it." --- Hey, death is natural, right? A part of life? Or at least the opposite of it? Look, for a long time I thought all you had to do was read Ernest Becker or maybe Elizabeth Kubhler-Ross, or take too much cough medicine while listening to techno music, and you'd have a pretty good idea of what death is about. Maybe so. But for centuries, Man (and Woman, after She acquired a Capitalized Pronoun) has tussled with this question, one of the most basic iterations of the subject-object duality problem. If we can only know what something is like by being alive to experience it, then we can't know what death is like. But if life is like something then death must be like something... else. Hence religion, family arguments over Christmas dinner, Deepak Choprah, and all that vicious nonsense. I don't know what it will be like to be dead, but I'm assuming it'll be similar to what it was like before I was born. It's not something that keeps me up at night, but here's something that does: the thought of slowly losing my mental and physical capacities and the ability to enjoy anything I used to, wasting away in pain and discomfort, waiting, wishing, hoping for death the way I used to wait for girls to call me when I was in junior high school. Robb's passion about his work is belied by his calm, relaxed mode of speaking. The only time I sense even a minor disturbance in The Force is when he mentions what brought him out of a high powered corporate job and into this line of work: some of the "bad deaths" he witnessed. Ernest Hemingway is said to have written the shortest short story ever: "For Sale: baby shoes, never worn." I think the phrase "bad death" is a contender for the short story title. And I don't think I, your humble scrivener, need to waste any more verbiage describing a "bad death." Those two words lie in the silence between every breath that we take. You Are Going To Die, remember? Initiative 1000: This thing is coming up. People are gathering petitions on the street as we speak; it will be on the ballot and there is going to be a vigorous debate. The well-financed authoritarian types are going to have a lot to say about this, much of it spurious. Luckily, we have some data to rely on, and it comes from our friends the Oregonians. 1000 is extremely similar in wording and intent to Oregon's law, and there has not been an influx of terminally ill people moving to Oregon to end their lives. Disabled citizens there have gone on doing what they and everyone else has always done: living. There hasn't been a single criminal investigation, nor one by the board of pharmacy or any medical association. "Despite," adds Robb, "all of the scrutiny our opponents have given it. This is a solid law." And it will be a solid law here, too... if we decide to make it one. --- In a way, we all die alone, just as we all live alone, inside our own minds, unable to discern with 100 percent accuracy the things of the world and the intentions of others. But I think Compassion and Choices' unofficial slogan nails it: No one dies in pain and no one dies alone. We are human; we are weak. We don't have tiger teeth or turtle shells or the totally freaking awesome horns of a supremely kick-ass, majorly enraged rhinoceros. We don't have much besides our brains and the support of one another, and that's how we've survived this long. We'd better keep using those two advantages if we're going to continue. When I was in college, I got into activism because I saw in political action a vast potential for destroying private property in the street and, like, changing things, man. I haven't been a very...active... activist lately, but I know even lazy hedonists like me can be inspired to work when their issue is on the line. Well, listen to this: You are going to die. Everyone you know and love, one day, will die. This is your issue. This is our issue; never mind that it is also one small piece of the greater struggle to prevent the usual heavyweight finger-wagging arbiters of Taste and Morality from deciding how we will Live Our Lives. Let's get it together and get this thing on the ballot and passed with the overwhelming majority it deserves. Let's get it right, preserve basic human dignity for ourselves and everyone else, and do this. No more "bad deaths." Speak up now while you've still got the breath in your body. Go to www.yeson1000.org and sign up to gather signatures or help out however you can. For more information about Compassion & Choices of WA, go to www.CandCofWA.org. Just go to the site; don't put this paper down and think "I'll go to that site;" just go to the site (yep, two semicolons; it's that important). A call to 206-633-2008 will also get you set up to volunteer. And regardless of how good the words were, vote yes on 1000. Thanks. |
Belltown Messenger
RSS FEED |
(subscribe here)
Belltown Links
Belltowner (blog) |
Belltown.org | Belltown Business Association | Bus Routes | Downtown Condos | Regrade Dog Park | Belltown Map | Olympic Sculpture Park | Belltown P-Patch | Belltown Restaurants | 
 |
|
|
|
|
|
© 2008 Belltown Messenger