Time For The Ice Floe, Pop

By LANCE MORROW

I was born a few days after Hitler marched into Poland, and as a boy I absorbed, by moral osmosis and overheard conversation, some of the lessons of the time--for example, lessons taught by Auschwitz and Josef Mengele.

So when I hear about euthanasia and Jack Kevorkian, sirens go off in my mind. Maybe I'm working with an old paradigm, like Munich, but I can't help it. I think of the case of Franz Stangl, a perfectly conventional Vienna policeman and good citizen who after the Anschluss became a security officer at hospitals for the aged, infirm and imbecilic, and helped--humanely at first, so they said--to ease the very worst cases, the utterly hopeless, the deformed and subhuman, toward a death that all reasonable people at the time thought would be the only decent thing. Having launched himself upon the course, Stangl did a giant slalom down the slippery slope and before too long found himself working as commandant of Treblinka, a Nazi extermination camp in Poland. There, Stangl presided over the death of 900,000 Jews.

What's that got to do with Kevorkian? It is not so difficult, for me at least, to envision a society of brave new benignity and rationality, in which a sort of humane disposal system would tidy up and whisk away to dreamland the worst-case geezers and crones. They are, after all, incredibly expensive and unproductive; the poor droolers cost a fortune, the lion's share of an already out-of-control medical budget. They are miserable in their lives. And they are a terrible inconvenience to that strain of the American character that has sought to impose rational control on all aspects of life (race relations, gender relations, child rearing, diet, marriage) but, at its worst, cannot bear pain or inconvenience, whether from an unexpected pregnancy (solution: legalize abortion) or an insensibly lingering dad or mom (solution: um, Kevorkian?).

Would it be so farfetched to envision a society that in the name of efficiency and convenience (the best thing for everyone, really, under the circumstances) practiced Kevorkianism as a matter of routine in every community? Time for the ice floe, Pop. Such is the little black Pandora's box that popped open in my mind as I watched 60 Minutes.

Of course, when the baby boomers themselves get up into the Kevorkian years, there may be interesting changes in their thinking. Alongside the euthanasia that some might be willing to visit on their parents (the end-of-life completion of the parricide they rehearsed when shouldering their elders aside in the '60s), they will no doubt devote themselves feverishly to bringing about miracles to extend their lives. Viagra was just the beginning. The boomers' will toward immortality is quite fierce and will eventually produce, though I will not be around to see them, hilarious tragedies.

My sister Cathleen calls me back from this mordant line of thinking. A boomer herself, she is a doctor in Maine. She delivered three babies on Thanksgiving Day. She attends old people all the time, watches them die and anguishes over their endgame suffering. I tell her, "The law must never be an accessory to murder." She replies, "Be careful there. Be careful. We are not talking about murder in these cases, but about compassionate care in terminal cases in which the life has already been lived and is, in fact, now over."

I cannot believe the law should ever sanction euthanasia--the very word sounds sinister to me, an Orwellian corruption. The trouble is, I also like the libertarian thought that a person damn well has a right to die when he wants to. The solution I propose to Cathy is this: what we already have--a quiet, informal, private routine in which families and physicians agree, without fuss and in an unofficial zone below the purview of the law, to withhold further treatment, to cut off nourishment, to shut down the IV, even to administer a little more morphine (a gray area between omission and commission) than would be indicated ordinarily. In other words, to pull the plug, decently and quietly. Result: an easeful, dignified death, without paperwork.

Up to a point, says Cathleen. Most doctors around the country consider Kevorkian a sort of useful nut, she judges; they are not necessarily unhappy that he has raised the issue. The problem with my solution, she says, is that it gives doctors no legal protection. For example, a nurse who disapproves of the decision of family and doctor to withhold care or to actively hasten death might report the case and have everyone up on malpractice--or murder--charges.

I know. But I am still worried about the terrible, institutionalized temptation that will be installed if Kevorkianism becomes legal. I knew a man who was broke and trying to send his children through college, but was heir to his uncle's modest fortune. The uncle, amiably gaga and perversely vigorous, lived on and on, through his 80s, into his 90s. His round-the-clock medical care ate through the money. My friend gnashed his teeth and lived on baked beans. How he longed to put in a call to Dr. Jack.

I circle round the subject and settle, for want of a better landing spot, on my sister's words: Be careful there. Be careful.