Doctor Jack’s Back

His profession was to study the nature of diseases. However, somewhere down life’s road, Dr Jack Kevorkian, retired pathologist, started studying death. He advanced the compassionate philosophy of Florence Nightingale and Mother Teresa to a new and controversial plateau, offering to alleviate people’s suffering by putting them to death, of course with their implicit consent. He claims to have assisted in at least 130 deaths in the 1990s. He called it Mercy Killing. The U.S. government was monitoring him the way they monitor a potential terrorist, just waiting for an opening. The game of death was going to lead Dr Jack Kevorkian to incarceration eventually.

When Dr. Kevorkian met Thomas Youk in 1998. Youk informed Dr. Kevorkian that he wanted to die. Stricken with Lou Gehrig’s disease, Youk was sick and tired of choking on his own saliva. So, Kevorkian administered the shots that would send Youk into eternity. However, the good doctor by now had grown arrogant. He taped the entire proceedings and gave the film to CBS, 60 Minutes. He also began sending out fatal sound bites through the media, daring the authorities to prosecute him. They did. He was convicted and jailed with a sentence of 10 to 25 years for second-degree murder of Thomas Youk.

Now Dr Death as, he is commonly known, has been paroled. He is out of jail after having spent about 3,000 days in prison. He was sentenced in April 1999.

Dr. Death has promised that he will not assist in any more suicides but he says that he is going to be a strong advocate to make Mercy Killing legal in the U.S.  Kevorkian’s face looks gaunt; his 78-year-old body is plagued by hepatitis C and diabetes but he vows to fight until the end.

The question here is simple:  Is he right or wrong? Again, this all comes down to religion and morality. Does a human being who is a virtual vegetable have the moral authority to end his or her life? Assuming there exists no scientific hope, of bringing them back from the living dead. What then….? What do you say to a person, who, of his or her own free will wants to die? Never mind the law with its complications, rebuttals, appendixes, loopholes and closing arguments Never mind religion and philosophy, the Supreme Court and public morality.

 What would you say to someone like this?

“It is my life and if I want to die, it is my choice. I would have committed suicide, if I could, but I am a vegetable, so I need someone like Dr. Jack Kevorkian to help me die. I have lived for years and years, like this, suffering in ways that are both terrifying degrading and painful. I do not feel human anymore. I truly would be better off dead. I have thought about this extensively. I believe in God. I believe in prayer. Why this happened to me, I do not know. Right now, I do not care.  Even God would not want a human being living the way I exist. A rodent can breathe and feel, move and eat, defecate and urinate without help. I cannot. You will never know how I feel. Try; put yourself in my body, agony and torment for one day. You tell me to pray, I do. You tell me while there is life there is hope. Well, modern science does not think so. I do not want to wait for a miracle cure from God or man anymore. I just want peace for my body, for my mind. For what I have gone through in the last fifteen years, I believe that I have earned the right to make this one final choice. I choose to die with whatever little dignity I have left. My choice does not threaten your way of life, or your morality, or the future of your children. Look at me; picture yourself like me for the next fifteen years.”

What would you say to someone like this?