writing lesson, groundwork

Hey All,

I’ve been really unhappy and stuck with the section about death with dignity. Then I woke up early this morning with an idea for a possible way to salvage it. Here is how the text currently is. I have to leave in a few minutes to get my bimonthly infusion for Crohn’s disease, and I may or may not work on it while I’m getting the infusion. I’ll probably sleep, but just in case I do get some work done, I wanted you to have this version so you can compare. Later tonight, or tomorrow, I’ll send the other version, and walk you through why I didn’t like the earlier version, and as well as I can remember detail the processes I went through before the new ideas came to me.

Thank you,

Derrick

I went to see Jeannette, who, like John, represents everything good about the medical field.

She gave me a hug, as she normally does at the start of an appointment, and asked, also as she normally does, “How are you doing, Sweetheart?”

I shrugged my shoulders and slowly wobbled my head noncommittally.

“I understand,” she said.

How often, I thought, is this really all we want: to feel that someone understands at least a little of what we’re going through?

We dealt with the health issue for which I was visiting her, then sat in chairs facing each other across the small examining room, also as we normally do after consults, and as we especially did during the time of my mother’s dying.

After a couple of false starts, I said, “My mom just wants to die with dignity.”

She looked at me, silent. I knew she wasn’t considering what to say, but how to say it. In my experience she has always been both relentlessly honest, and relentlessly compassionate. Again, the best of the medical field. Finally she said, “One way or another, I think that’s what we all want. But the sad truth is that almost none of us ever get that.”

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Until that moment, I’d never considered the phrase. Oh, sure, I’d read it, heard people say it, said it myself, wished it for my mother, wished it for myself, wished it for almost everyone I didn’t despise. But it was just a cliché. No matter how many times I’d had great long conversations about it, no matter how many people with whom I’d had these conversations, I’d never thought about the phrase, and I suspected most of the people with whom I’d discussed it hadn’t either.

When I think of death with dignity, the first people (literary or real) who come to mind are Sydney Carton, Lord Jim, King Charles I, and Teddy Sheean.

Sydney Carton, of course, is the cynical, self-loathing lawyer in Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities, who redeems his wasted life by surreptitiously substituting himself for someone about to be guillotined, and whose final act is to comfort a young seamstress also about to be killed. Dickens suggests Carton’s final words, had he time to articulate them, could have been, “It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.”

Lord Jim, the titular character in a novel by Joseph Conrad, is an honorable man who, under stress, commits an unforgivably craven act, then spends the rest of the book attempting to atone. At the end, he has the opportunity to re-make his earlier decision, and acts with courage, knowing it will cost him his life.

Charles I was King of England, Scotland, and Ireland, during the English Civil War. His side lost. The day of his execution was frigid, and he asked to wear two shirts, so he would not shiver from cold, which, he said, “some observers may imagine proceeds from fear.”

Australian seaman Edward “Teddy” Sheean was eighteen in 1942 when his ship, HMAS Armidale, was, off the coast of Timor, struck by two Japanese air-launched torpedoes. The Armidale began to list hard to port, and the order was given to abandon ship. After helping to free a life-raft, Sheean was struck in the back and chest by bullets from strafing fighters. Instead of joining his fellow crew in their life-rafts, he scrambled across the deck, strapped himself to an anti-aircraft gun, and began firing. He took down one bomber, damaged two other aircraft, and forced the others to withdraw. The ship’s stern went under. He kept firing. The water came over his feet. He kept firing. The water went over his head. He kept firing. The last anyone saw of him were tracers emerging from the water.

I’m not sure, however, that these examples apply to my mom’s circumstances. The people certainly acted with dignity, but are these really “deaths with dignity”; or are they acts of dignity immediately preceding death, acts of dignity in the face of death? Is there a difference? What of the deaths themselves? In the first and third cases decapitation, in the second case a gunshot wound to the chest, and in the final case drowning after having been shot twice: in all cases the distal cause of death were acts by hostile beings. And as much as I wanted my mother to be able to die on her own terms, I didn’t want her to be decapitated, shot, or drowned because of those hostile to her.

I looked up “death with dignity” on the Internet, and it has nothing to do with dignified acts as such, and nothing to do with shooting enemy airplanes as your ship is sinking: it’s an advertising/political slogan created and promoted by those pushing for assisted suicide, medical aid in dying, physician-assisted death, whatever you want to call it, and was first used in the 1990s in the campaign to pass Oregon legislation governing the prescribing of life-ending medications to eligible people.

I’ve obviously got nothing against medical aid in dying, but, after my conversation with Jeannette, and this cursory research, I found myself growing daily more confused about both what death with dignity is, and what it means.

Looking up the etymology of dignity didn’t help much either.