Thoughts on Kevorkian

Jack Kevorkian has been released from prison eight years after being convicted of aiding euthenasia. The man Kevorkian was convicted of helping to die was an ALS patient.

ALS is an incurable, untreatable degenerative disease in which the motor neurons which control muscle movement deteriorate and muscles atrophy and patients become paralyzed. They become incapable of speaking, eating, and eventually breathing. The disease does not affect those parts of the nervous system which support conscious thought, so ALS patients are fully aware of the deterioration of their bodies. People may survive for a time with the benefit of feeding tubes and ventilators to do their breathing for them (most famously, perhaps, Stephen Hawking), but this disease is always eventually fatal. Most people live 2-5 years after diagnosis, trapped in a deteriorating body.

This is a cruel, remorseless, relentness disease. And there is not a damn thing the medical people can do about it. Nothing.

I know this not because I'm a medical professional (I'm not), but because I watched my mother die of ALS. Her brother also died of ALS, which means that there is some chance that the kind of ALS which killed my mother is the genetic variety. If that were true, I would have a 50/50 chance of contracting the disease myself. And if I did, then my daughter would face the same 50/50 odds.

So I have thought about this in a very direct and personal way. If I contracted this disease, I would not want to experience the progressive breakdown of my body prior to my inevitable death. Why should I, or anyone, be compelled to go through that? Why should my family have to watch it? Yet, to choose otherwise I would be obliged to make myself and anyone who chose to help me into a criminal. That means, to avoid criminalizing loved ones, friends and medical advisors, I would be forced by law to try to do this all by myself, alone, by whatever crude means I could muster. And so I ask myself, would it even be possible to do that in a way which didn't inflict further trauma and suffering on my family, forcing them to confront some ugly scene which would make the loss of a loved one that much more horrible? Would I choose to do that to my family?

Trapped, and trapped again.

For me, these are the questions that Kevorkian's punishment bring up.

I admire and appreciate what he did to minimize the suffering of others. I wish there were more like him, and that the rest of us could accept that, sometimes, for some people, death is not the worst thing that could happen. And we should tolerate, even support, those who make this choice.