TWO WEEKS AGO, Peggy Noonan was a guest on my radio show talking about Ronald Reagan, the subject of her latest book, When Character Was King (Random House). I mentioned to her that Reagan’s son Michael had told me a few years back that his father was in good spirits, thoroughly enjoying visits by friends though not remembering 10 minutes later that they had been there. Peggy replied that now, because of his Alzheimer’s, the former president can no longer perform tasks such as feeding himself, and he has lost most of his personality. I asked how Nancy Reagan was handling it. "With loving determination," Peggy said.
So much loving determination, in fact, that Mrs. Reagan has rejected the conservative mantra on stem-cell research: that it should be banned because it is an inherently anti-life proposition. Instead, Mrs. Reagan, aware that many specialists believe that a cure for Alzheimer’s will one day come via stem-cell research, has made her position in favor of it widely known. Her husband’s circumstances awakened her to a revelation; maybe "epiphany" is the better word.
Republican senator Connie Mack, who has several cancer sufferers among his family members, joined Mrs. Reagan in this, as have some other prominent traditionalist conservatives who have had their steadfast opposition to abortion, to which stem-cell research is often analogized, altered by reality.
These examples came to mind when I read "Elusive Death," William F. Buckley Jr.’s November 9 National Review column, which sets out the constitutional and ethical issues raised by Attorney General John Ashcroft’s decision to seek a stay of Oregon’s law allowing for physician-assisted suicide. Since the law's passage in 1994 (it was re-approved by voters in 1997), 70 people have made use of it. On November 20, a federal judge extended a temporary stay against Ashcroft’s order banning doctors from participating in assisted suicides. The Justice Department and Oregon attorney general now have five months to prepare for a trial in Federal District Court.
In his column, Buckley also cited Ashcroft’s recent decision to order the raid of a health-care facility in California that distributes marijuana for medicinal use — which is legal under California law. (Another measure passed by ballot referendum.) Buckley was one of the first from the conservative side of the aisle to speak favorably about easing laws against marijuana (I was there before him, but he’s young, he’ll learn). Like Reagan and Mack, he was influenced by the painful experiences of a loved one: a few years ago he became a crusader for access to medical marijuana when he saw how much relief the drug gave his sister — who was struggling with cancer.
As I thought about Buckley’s column — which struck such a chord with me that I wrote him a response — I struggled to remember when the war on terrorism was won. After all, it’s hard to imagine that John Ashcroft can really afford to divert himself from his 24/7 commitment to rooting out domestic terrorism just so he can attack the rights of voters in Oregon and California.
NOT LONG after I nearly died in October 1994, I made a commitment to do anything I could to continue to live as long and healthily as possible. But not if the joy goes out of living. The impediments that confront me now, while unpleasant, are mere nuisances: I take about 55 pills every day; like Calvin Coolidge, Winston Churchill, and Ronald Reagan, I require a daily nap; I have neuropathy in my feet, which means some parts constantly hurt and others have no sensation; and I suffer from lipodystrophy, which means my body distributes fat irregularly — there’s a nasty deposit on my stomach that no number of sit-ups will eliminate, while my arms and legs remain unusually thin despite daily workouts. But there will come a day for me, as it has for millions of others with AIDS, when HIV begins to win its war. My energy will plummet. I won’t be able to keep food down. My weight will drop precipitously. I may face blindness or mental derangement or any of the dozens of unpleasant "complications related to HIV/AIDS" from which people succumb — as the obituaries so delicately put it.
Will Ashcroft be there to arrest me if I need marijuana? If I still have the cogency to recognize my condition and the will to ask to be (pardon the euphemism, but it comes with the territory) "put out of my misery," will he deny my doctor the right to prescribe morphine? Will he threaten to jail any physician who helps me get the damn thing over with? When it comes to death, I’m with Woody Allen, who said: "It’s not that I’m afraid of dying, I just don’t want to be there when it happens." Nor does anyone else.
Since writing my memoir in 1997 (Life Is Not a Rehearsal), I haven’t publicly discussed any of the horrific experiences related to my extended hospitalization and first year of recuperation. But I felt the need to do so when I wrote to my friend Bill Buckley. I recalled an episode when I was learning to walk again at Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital. Without warning, I was struck with convulsions throughout my whole body. I shook so violently that I grabbed the edge of my bed to keep from catapulting across the room. I lost control of my bowels. The fear and dread I felt, as I literally howled in pain and terror, recurred again and again over the next week as the convulsions spontaneously usurped my body. My fear that first time was the worst I’ve ever experienced — well, the worst fear I’ve experienced related to a physical ailment.
My doctor at Spaulding told me that the convulsions would pass. He explained that I was experiencing a combination of post-herpetic neuralgia (the aftereffects of shingles, which I’d contracted weeks earlier while at Massachusetts General Hospital) and another infection. While the post-herpetic neuralgia might never ease, he warned (though it has, to a significant extent, during these last seven years), the other infection was treatable and would eventually pass. But after just three days of these nightmarish seizures I found myself looking out my seventh-floor window down at the FleetCenter, which was then under construction, and seriously wondering whether I’d be worse off if I just tossed myself to my death. There is no doubt in my mind that if what I had come to call the "beast from the bowels" stayed with me, I would have ended my life on my own — probably, given my ineptitude, with considerable messiness — if I hadn’t been able to arrange for a "good death" via euthanasia.
MY FATHER died in 1997 at age 89 following a few months of intense pain caused by the spread of prostate cancer into his central nervous system, and a few remaining months with his pain considerably reduced by medication. I think of him every day, but I’m glad that he died as he did, rather than have to endure any more pain or experience the only other alternative (besides death): a near-vegetative state. I’m glad, too, that Ashcroft wasn’t there to yank the medication tubes from my father’s body. I’ll be fortunate if he’s not lurking somewhere trying to "save" me from myself when the time comes.
The attorney general’s position on these matters shouldn’t surprise anyone; he established a consistent, authoritarian record as a senator. Although he promised to enforce all laws — including those he opposes — during the meek and mild performance he put on for his confirmation hearings, he never said that he wouldn’t direct the federal government’s enforcement powers to overturn state laws he finds distasteful.
The left often misunderstands the traditionalist right, but liberals who opposed Ashcroft’s confirmation saw the future clearly, as did those of us on the libertarian right. We saw that the so-called social issues central to the character of authoritarian moralists like John Ashcroft would come back to haunt us. For men like Ashcroft, matters of virtue, truth, and God’s will are not topics for discussion during a late-night dinner with friends, but values that must be championed and pursued. Championed and pursued, in Ashcroft’s case, in the public arena.
Thus, authoritarian conservatives believe that since only God can take a life (unless, of course, it's a matter of state execution), even a patient suffering in miserable torment may not be permitted to advance his entry into Glory in advance of Our Lord’s timetable.
This is the kind of thing that troubles those of us who fretted (and fret still) about the Bush presidency's social agenda. But we have short memories here in our Land of Abundant Tomorrows, and many of us, rallying around the president and his administration in combating terrorism, forgot that until September 11 the Bush administration had shown that its support of the conservative social agenda was not mere rhetoric. Candidate Bush meant it, President Bush means it, and his cabinet officers preach it.
For Ashcroft, God and Government know best. The attorney general evidently has the odious temperament of the much-reviled (by conservatives) Nanny State: he likes big government when it’s big in the right direction. He seems bereft of empathy for those whose situation might require medical intervention that goes against his interpretation of divine will. To be sure, some are comforted by an attorney general who won’t let mere citizens make up their own minds about how they live and die. However, as General Ashcroft diverts government resources and energy to matters that need never have become federal problems in the first place, others get that unmistakable chill up our spines, wondering how much additional damage this sanctimonious man will inflict on the American people.
David Brudnoy teaches in the College of Communication at Boston University and is a WBZ Radio talk-program host and film critic for the Community Newspaper Company.
Agree? Disagree? Comment on this article in the Phoenix Forum.
