October 05, 2005

Death On Her Own Terms
by Lorraine Berry

The Oregon law gives comfort to Charlene Andrews, a Salem woman with advanced cancer.

She looks healthy until she pulls the blond wig from her hairless head and describes the side effects from continuous chemotherapy. Andrews, 68, said the drugs slow the spread of cancer cells but probably won't cure her.

Andrews will fight death as long as possible, but when death is imminent, she wants to use the Oregon law to decide how and when she dies.

"Death with dignity is part of my spiritual journey. This has taken the fear out of dying for me," Andrews said.

Charlene Andrews is my former mother-in-law. And take it from me, the Supreme Court does not want to get into an argument with this woman. 'Nuff said on that.

I remember distinctly when my then-husband got the phone call. Christmas, 2000. His mother had just been diagnosed with Stage IV breast cancer. It doesn't get much worse than that, but, through incredibly aggressive oncology treatments and tenacity that one rarely sees in this world, Charlene and her doctors have kept her alive for almost five years. In those years, she has traveled, hiked, and climbed her beloved mountains. She has also actively supported other people with cancer. Charlene is determined to celebrate her 70th birthday--two years away. And I, among many others who know her, have every belief that she'll make it. But Charlene has also decided that, when the time comes, she wants to have some say in how and when she'll die. And you know what? That's a PRIVACY issue--a medical decision she will make. She and her doctor. Not she and the rest of the country. I believe these are the kinds of rights that the Founding Fathers referred to in the Ninth Amendment.

Oregon's Death with Dignity law is up before the Supreme Court
today. It's the first significant case that John Roberts will likely rule on, and those of us who wonder what his position on the right to privacy is are waiting with bated breath.

It was AG John Ashcroft who stepped in after Oregon voters approved the act. He phrased his intervention in legal gobbledy-gook, but there was never any doubt that his objection to the law was based on his own religious beliefs. Apparently, a good death involves suffering, and people attempting to have some control over their bodies gave the body-phobic Ashcroft agita.

A lot of right-wing groups have weighed in on this issue. They've got no problem with executing juveniles, but terminally ill patients making a medical decision over end-of-life issues violates their sense of moral superiority over the rest of us. The arrogance of anyone stepping in to tell someone who has a terminal illness how they may or may not exit this world sickens me. Really.

I'm tired of the control freaks in this culture getting to run the show. I understand that certain fundamentalist religions make the body a less frightening place to inhabit by attempting to discipline it. Let's face it. Bodies do all sorts of things we don't understand. They shit and piss and fuck and reproduce and fart and sneeze and get sick. And eventually, they die. We all die. And for all their talk of heaven and an afterlife and the Rapture, all I ever really seem to feel from these people is fear. Fear that maybe there isn't something after death. Or that their God is such a big, scary dude that they can't trust him to have really saved them.

And it's their anxieties, their sick, twisted anxieties about death and life and bodies and sex, that they keep trying to impose on the rest of us. They couch it in terms of compassion, but really? It's pure selfishness. They really don't give a flying fuck about the rest of us. What they really care about is getting their ticket punched to heaven. So their fears of death can be erased. And somehow, they've gotten it into their heads that the Golden Ticket means making your neighbor miserable.

In the meantime, Charlene is in DC, bearing witness to the frailty and the splendour of life.

Posted by in Activism, Body, Christian Fundamentalism, Culture War, Fascism, Health, Human Rights, Law, Right To Die, SCOTUS
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