The Old Man: My Death With Dignity

July 2, 2009, 2:04 pm
The Old Man: My Death With Dignity
By Hilding Lindquist

In New Jersey and 47 other of the 50 states, I am set apart from those who are compelled by law to end their days in unimaginably debilitating pain and suffering, knowing it will only get worse until relief is found in death.

I can choose to die with dignity accompanied by compassionate support and palliative medical care. Why? Because my kidneys have failed. I am on dialysis.

I can end my dialysis and check into a hospice whenever I choose, sooner or later slipping into the blissful fog that comes with death from kidney failure, though I am not planning on choosing to do so anytime soon.

I know the drill of dying. I have been there only to be pulled back, to live these six-plus years since I first suffered acute kidney failure in July 2002. I remember the cotton-candy softness of dying from kidney failure as my body began to shut down completely. It took nine units of blood, more blood than what I had to begin with, to bring me back.

The following month, in August, I was diagnosed with prostate cancer. My father had died of prostate cancer. The pain of the cancer spreading to my bones was not my idea of a death with dignity. I decided I would let my kidney failure rule my prostate cancer in determining outcomes, if push came to shove.

Is it fair that I can choose to end my life to avoid pain and suffering and others cannot? The exceptions are in Oregon, and now the State of Washington where physician aid-in-dying (PAD) has recently been allowed.

In New Jersey this issue has been addressed by Winthrop Thies, former president of the Hemlock Society of New Jersey (the predecessor organization to Compassion and Choices of New Jersey, Inc.) in an essay found on the Web site of the Ethical Culture Society of Essex County, “Fairness, Freedom and the Dying.”

My decision to let my kidney failure rule the manner in which I die is not without precedent. One prominent person to choose death from kidney failure was Art Buchwald, American humorist, Washington Post columnist and Pulitzer Prize winner.

In February 2006, Buchwald checked into a Washington-area hospice after choosing to forgo dialysis. After Buchwald’s death on Jan. 17, 2007, Richard Severo wrote an obituary entitled, “Art Buchwald, Whose Humor Poked the Powerful, Dies at 81.” Before his death, Mr. Buchwald was interviewed for his own obituary, which begins, “Hi. I’m Art Buchwald and I just died,” and can be seen here.

There is little or no reason to think my kidneys would kick back in to any appreciable degree like Art Buchwald’s, if and when I ended dialysis — in case you wonder. I am not praying for a miracle. I am accepting my death as a part of my life, a final act of giving myself to the cycle of life.

In choosing how I can die, I have felt a renewed vigor in living.

But I am left with questions. Where do we draw the line on choosing how we die? And maybe even more important, where do we draw the line on choosing how you die? Isn’t that the concern in the shifting sands of these moral values, that the elderly will be expected to voluntarily choose death?

http://maplewood.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/02/the-old-man-my-death-with-dignity/