Radio Commentary: The Supreme Court, Assisted Suicide and My Father

Producer: Lonny Shavelson
Contact: lonny@photowords.com  510 849 9382

Host’s Intro: Questions about the right-to-die have recently reached a feverish boil. And the Supreme Court will be considering Oregon’s legalization of assisted suicide for the terminally ill – a practice opposed by the federal department of justice.  Lonny Shavelson , a physician and journalist and the author of  “A Chosen Death: The Dying Confront Assisted Suicide,” has this commentary. 

TRAK1: As the Supreme Court considers arguments for and against allowing dying patients to get help in hastening their death,  the justices could benefit from the testimony – of my father.  He was a soft spoken man who grew up poor in Brooklyn, and moved to Florida at seventy-five after a lifetime in New York’s garment district.  And because he had his first of three heart attacks when he was sixty-five, my dad spent years thinking about death.  Soon after my mother died, he stopped sleeping well.  He’d be awake into the early morning hours, playing Guy Lombardo records while talking to his kids through a tape recorder.  We found the tape after he died.   

AX1: Irving Shavelson: A lot of sleepless nights I spend lately, little problems that keep me up. And I talk to you guys.  I feel like I want to get you to know me a little.  You know me plenty, both of you but.. (sings) Abide with me, the darkness deepens, abide with me.   I guess you’re laughing at my singing, but through some of the roughest times I’ve had, I’ve been able to find something funny and something laughable, and that’s what life is more than anything else to me.  

TRAK2: But though my dad sang and laughed on the tape, he relived the more difficult memories as well…  

AX2: Irving Shavelson: Remember, Lon, a number of years back, when I was in the hospital, I had my bypass done. And you came in from California. The operation was over, and as I opened my eyes the first one I saw was you. And you were consoling me, OK, Dad, everything’s fine, everything went through well. And I recall how I felt when I was in the hospital. The worst thing that could happen to me was, everybody is in control of me, that I couldn’t control any of my own life at all. 

            TRAK3: Later that year, my dad lapsed into unconsciousness from a sudden cardiac pause. His brain died, his body did not.  I rushed to the hospital, and he was deep in a  coma, kept alive by a breathing machine.  I knew what my dad would want. We had discussed how he might die, and under what circumstances he would not want to live.  I showed the doctors his Living Will that specifically expressed his wishes not to be kept alive by machinery, and the Durable Power of Attorney that gave me, his son, the right to make decisions for him.  Now his physicians and I stood by my father’s unconscious body, and turned off the machines.  We intended for him to die.  And listening to his tapes today, I am sure that was his wish as well. 

             AX4: Irving Shavelson: I don’t know when you’ll be hearing this or what but, dying is dying, you got to die sometime, and… 

             TRAK4: When we turned off the ventilator, what was left of my dad’s brain took over, just enough to keep him barely breathing.  The rush of adrenaline as his body still argued for life drenched him in sweat, whipped at his heart.  For hours he lay gasping for breath – but not dying.  “Please,” I asked his doctor, “can we give him more sedation, stop the agony of this prolonged suffocation?”  “We can’t do that,” she replied.  “It’s illegal.” Although we had turned off the machinery meaning for my father to die, his continued breathing changed the rules.  There was a fine legal distinction between withdrawing life support, or administering medication that might slow or stop his breathing – a practice forbidden by law.  I wiped at my father’s soaking forehead.  For hours, I whispered loving words to ease this agonizing end.  And then – I could abandon him no longer.

"Excuse me," I said to the nurse, "I need to be alone with my dad."  Behind the closed doors, I held my father in my arms, and faced my own decision.  Moments later, the shrill alarms of the ICU monitors announced that my father’s breathing and heartbeat had stopped.  I cradled my dad, the two of us alone, finally in peace.

When the Supreme Court justices listen to the best arguments from all sides of this aid in dying debate, they might do well to turn their heads toward one more voice, that of my dad, as they decide whether to rule that dying patients can receive medical assistance if needed, to end their lives.  

AX5: Irving Shavelson: Aw right, until next time. I feel better. Thanks for listening.
 

 TRAK5: From San Francisco, this has been Lonny, and Irving Shavelson.