Sisters Of Mercy

By DAVID VAN BIEMA/DETROIT

They'd take up a whole pew, the Weaver girls. "Everybody called us that," says Nan. Five born in seven years. Joanne was Daddy's girl, at least that's what the others claimed. Barb had red hair and matching temper. "Little Nan" was timid and quiet. Then came Sue, then Mary, the baby. They lived a classic Roman Catholic postwar childhood: their father, a bandleader, easygoing and affectionate; his wife a stern but loving homemaker; new outfits, with bonnets, each Easter; the strict, black-and-white doctrine of the Baltimore Catechism. Ice skating at the church rink. Splitting the work after supper, one girl clearing, one washing, one drying, one sweeping. And the games until dusk. "Red rover, red rover," says Mary. "Remember? Let Sue come over."

Sue was the one who was always sick. "The doctor more or less said that she was just born with a screwed-up immune system," says Joanne. She had a bodywide eczema starting in infancy, rheumatic fever and meningitis in childhood, a progressive eye ailment in her later years.

The sisters remember the eczema. "I'd wake up in the middle of the night and hear her scratching herself with a comb or brush," says Nan. "I don't think she ever slept the night through." When Sue was 12, a malignant tumor appeared on her forehead; doctors were able to remove it, but more than 10 operations were needed to rebuild her eyebrow and part of her eyelid. "I just remember, she always had a big bandage around her head," says Mary.

One malady she was spared was self-pity. Sue held her own at jacks and hide- and-seek, and later sneaked Viceroys with Nan behind the drugstore instead of going to Mass. She was the one with the sense of humor, memorizing the candy-on-a-speeded-up-conveyor-belt episode from I Love Lucy; the one who was tone-deaf but couldn't care less, belting out Cross Over the Bridge, the Patti Page rouser, at top volume.

She was never the brightest of the five, and her eye condition made reading difficult. But she had a ferocious will. "A very stubborn girl," Mary notes. "It was hard to sway her." The best example was her courtship. Every week of their adolescence, the younger Weaver girls went to the Ambassador Bowling Alley, which was managed by a good-natured, black-haired man named Les Williams. "Les was the cat's meow," says Mary. "He was super." He was a year older than their father. Sue never bowled, but she would sit for hours eating French fries and chatting with her girlfriends. It was several years before her sisters discovered that Sue, 18, was dating Les, 48. "When our mother found out," says Mary, "she said, 'You're not going to see him,' which, you know, just made the candy look better." Sue took a room three houses down the street, and married Les the day she turned 21. Her mother forgave them, but not in silence. "She would say, 'You're crazy to marry him. He'll probably end up in a wheelchair with you having to take care of him,' " recalls Mary.

That is not the way it worked out. In 1962 Sue and Les had a son Dan, and a little later moved to the blue-collar suburb of Clawson, Michigan. To make ends meet, Les worked 12 to 16 hours a day. Every morning Sue would meet friends for breakfast at the Kresge coffee shop nearby, then set out on her route as an Avon Lady. Since her eyesight prevented her from getting a driver's license, she rode a little Amigo scooter. "We were always telling her, 'God, would you slow that thing down?' " says Mary. Sue's customers made their own change. She hooked rugs and played bingo and, by general consensus, spoiled little Danny. Every Sunday, when he was old enough, they would bicycle to the Guardian Angels Church nearby for the 10:30 Mass.

In 1980 Sue began to have trouble with her balance; her legs went numb. The eventual diagnosis was multiple sclerosis. By 1982 she could no longer ride the scooter; by 1984 she could not walk unaided. To help her out, Kresge gave her a shopping cart, which Les filled with bricks for ballast; pushing it, she could still get to the mall each morning.

Soon she could not move at all without being pushed or carried. Dan, now 30, puts it bluntly: "Her day. I'll go from start to finish. In the morning, my dad would get her up, take her out of bed, put her in a wheelchair, wheel her out to the dining-room table. She would have coffee, a cigarette, whatever. They would listen to the radio, my dad would do whatever he had to do, and at around 2 o'clock in the afternoon, the radio would be turned off, the TV would come on. Dad would fix the dinner at around 6, then he would have to feed her. And then they would watch TV until about 10 o'clock, and then he would put on her salve, for her skin, head to toe, front to back, and this took until about 11:30. Then he put her to bed. And then it went on, day after day, Monday through Sunday." When she needed to go to the bathroom, Les, by now in his late 70s, would have to lift her from wheelchair to toilet and pull down her slacks. Once while Les was out, the radio lost its signal: Sue listened to static for hours, unable to get to the dial.

Then in late 1990, Les, at 79, suffered an "incident" that involved a small stroke. He returned to Clawson after 10 days in the hospital, but more and more often there would be tearful phone calls for aid: Les had dropped Sue and couldn't lift her again. She became incontinent and needed a catheter. Nurses had to be hired to bathe her, and still she developed cellulitis, which attacked her skin. Joanne would smell Sue before she saw her. "It's like Sue was trapped inside this rotting body," she remembers. "All I could think of was, she's inside there somewhere.'

"At the beginning, Sue's faith was very strong," says Mary. "She just felt she was going to conquer this, and that somehow this was God's plan. But finally she got to the point where, you know, she would just say, 'Why me?' "

One day in February 1992, Joanne was on the phone with Sue. "And she said, 'What would you think if I told you I wanted to commit suicide?'

And later, when Joanne came to visit: "Would you write a letter for me to Dr. Kevorkian?"

"I wrote it," Joanne says, "because she wanted me to. I thought, well, maybe she'll change her mind. I didn't really think she was going to go ahead at that point. Or that he would, either. He was in ((legal)) trouble already, so I thought, no way."

Kevorkian called within two days. A meeting was arranged. It was videotaped, something he did both for his own records and for the police.

"Sue," he said on the tape, "put it in plain English. What is it you want?"

"I want to die, really," she replied. "In plain English."

"Well," said Kevorkian, "people would say that's rather, to put it mildly, extraordinary."

"No," said Sue. "I'm tired of sitting and seeing the day go in and out."

The tapes are remarkable. As a small mechanical clock with little whirling brass balls runs in the background, Kevorkian, palpably nervous and excited, ! introduces the sisters, Dan, Les and himself to the camera, operated by the doctor's sister Margo. In the first of the three taped sessions, over 2 1/2 months, he addresses mostly Sue's medical condition and her intent. Her voice is sometimes hard to follow because her disease has affected her speech. At his request, she attempts vainly to move three of her limbs and then manages, precariously, to pick up a cup of coffee with her one good hand.

Nan is the most supportive of the idea of assisted suicide: "The medical profession has just gotten to where they can keep you alive forever, but they don't know what to do with you." The others, at first, are more reserved, simply affirming that they will honor Sue's judgment. Les says he didn't originally agree, but "if she wanted me to stand on my head and jump off some of the buildings . . . I'd do it." A little while later, he begins to cry.

But then talk turns to God. Kevorkian remarks that the Archbishop of Detroit has pronounced his acts a sin. "Well, we don't all agree with that," says Nancy. "But Joanne and Mary do."

Mary: I feel it's a sin 'cause that's the way I was brought up.

Barb: It's the only unforgivable sin in the Bible.

Kevorkian: How about you, Les?

Les: I don't really think it's a sin.

Kevorkian: So it's three to two. How about you, Dan?

Dan: I don't think it's a sin.

Kevorkian (who is not religious): So it's even. Three to three. You're split even.

Joanne: I think the Bible says it's the only unforgivable sin, but I would never sit in judgment on her. Who knows what I would do in her position?

They cannot leave the point alone. Mary speaks up: "Sue, I have to ask you something. If the Catholic Church teaches that you're going to go to hell over this, do you think you're going to hell?"

Sue: No, I think I'm going to heaven, but I'll never see God.

Joanne: You know, I don't think hell is fire and brimstone; it's never seeing God.

Dan: Hell is just somewhere else; it's another . . .

Mary: Well, that's not what the Bible says . . . ((and)) if you have faith in God, you don't question what God does.

Sue: . . . I don't think God's gonna approve of it. I think he won't approve of it . . . ((But)) I don't believe I will go to hell.

At Kevorkian's request, Sue has consulted a professional on this: Father Robert McGrath, Joanne's priest. However, his written opinion that "Sue is ; being asked to go through with something that she has always been taught is wrong" infuriates her: "I think he took everything out of proportion. I talked to him because I had to." The subject is dropped.

Kevorkian will later say that when he first met Sue, he did not think she was "ready." But by the third videotaping session, in early May 1992, her condition has declined even further, and matters turn starkly practical. Sue tries on the medical anesthesia mask through which the carbon monoxide will flow. She has difficulty pulling it over her head, and Nan notes that it will take some practice. Suddenly, Kevorkian brings up a broader question: If Sue and Les, who live on Social Security and disability payments, were able to afford better care, would she change her mind about dying?

Sue: No. If I won the lottery tomorrow . . .

Nan: We've all said if she won the lottery, if she had 24-hour nursing . . .

Sue: If I had the chance of going into remission. But I never do.

Kevorkian: You won't back down?

Sue: No way. I want to get out of here.

The final piece of business was to set a date: May 15.

The sisters began to bring around their children and their grandchildren to see Sue, without necessarily saying why. Sue herself was obsessed with details -- about her body, the neighbors, the memorial service. But she expressed no concerns about death itself. "She almost seemed to get lighter," says Nan.

On the morning of May 15, the Weaver girls, one by one, arrived at Sue's house. Barb relayed a last-ditch message from her husband: "Tell her I said to cut the s--- out and forget about this." Sue replied, "No way." And then she said, "I'm ready." Dan rolled her back to the bedroom, and the rest heard her sobbing and telling him how much she loved him. At around 9:45, everyone else filed in.

"It couldn't have been more peaceful," says Mary. "Here was Sue, in her own bedroom, it was a beautiful sunny day, the birds were chirping outside, the back door was open, she had flowered sheets on her bed. It was just the way she wanted it."

Kevorkian had rigged a canister of carbon monoxide so that Sue, with the good hand, could push a lever to release the deadly gas. According to experts, carbon monoxide causes a headache, sometimes severe, before it kills. Sue made no mention of that but asked after several minutes why it was taking so long. As recorded by Kevorkian in his notes, "Within 2 minutes her breathing deepened, in 4 minutes her complexion became deep red, eyes widened, then she fell unconscious, eyes closed somewhat, breathing stertorous, gradually diminishing in volume and frequency to final deep gasps which diminished in frequency to zero by 10:10 a.m." She was 52.

"They said, 'She's gone, she's gone,' " says Joanne. "And they were getting ready to call the police. And I kept thinking, What if she's not? What if they come and try and revive her?"

Nan suddenly noticed "how thin she looked through the face."

Mary remembers thinking, "She's got to be happier, wherever she's going."

In the days that followed Sue's death, Nan got used to hitting the mute button on her TV. During the third videotape, when Sue was pulling on the gas mask, it was Nan who is recorded saying, "You'll have to practice with that." The sound bite ran again and again with each TV story on Sue's death. Nan, Sue's closest sister, found herself weeping uncontrollably. Her spirits have not been helped by some co-workers' reaction to the death. One, "a guy, I won't even tell you his name," she says, hollow-eyed, "came up to me and said, 'Well, Nancy, tell me: Did your sister squirm and kick?' "

Mary cries too, but her sorrow seems less likely to suck her under. During the videotaped sessions, she stepped into the role of Nan's opposite number, the most doctrinaire Christian, the most skeptical of Sue's choice. But she too has surprised herself. Not too long after Sue's death, she was listening to a radio call-in show and was so outraged by a caller's claims that the family had "pushed Sue into the grave" that she called in and offered a spirited defense of Sue, the doctor and the family.

Before Sue's death, Dan had moved back into the small house with her and Les. The two men lived alone until Les' death last month. Sue's room was bare except for a bed and a plaque Dan once gave her with a poem titled "Motherhood" on it. Dan found a girlfriend; his friends gave him a 30th- birthday party at a local comedy club. But that same weekend he picked the container to hold his mother's ashes. "There's not a day passes that I don't think of her," he says. "It probably will get better. But I don't know."

Thinking back, Joanne feels that Sue was more fearful of the eternal consequences than she let on. "You know, when Father McGrath was talking to Sue, he said we knew that suicide was a sin. A mortal sin. And Sue agreed. I | don't know if she said that in the tapes. I think it's because she was afraid Dr. Kevorkian wouldn't help her. That if she had said, 'Yes, I think it's a sin and I think I'm going to go to hell and be eternally damned,' he wouldn't help her. She didn't care, I guess. She was just so determined."

Joanne didn't go to confession after Sue's death. "You do that if you think you've committed a mortal sin," she says.

"But I'll tell you. When I go to bed at night, I say my prayers, and I always ask God that if I did anything wrong in going along with this, please forgive me for it, that it was her wish, and I felt it was something I had to do for her. It's not that I feel guilty about it, but I just hope that I didn't do something" -- she hesitates -- "that makes God frown on me."