Death is too serious a subject to be demeaned by demagoguing crackpots and crooks who have only contempt for reality

Why aren't we praising the VA for distributing this guide to the fraught world of end-of-life decisions? Why has the All-Lies All-the-Time Right jumped on it? Because they're lying, hate-spewing, terror-mongering crackpots and crooks with no sense of decency or shame. Why is Arlen Specter promising hearings on the so-called "Death Book"? Because he's a cynical, demagoguing son of a bitch who will apparently stop at nothing to promote his own political interests.

"If there is no reasonable expectation of my recovery from physical or mental disability, I wish to be allowed to die and not be kept alive by artificial means or heroic measures, but wish only that drugs be mercifully administered to me for terminal suffering, even if they hasten the moment of my death."

-- from my mother's living will

by Ken

The death of Sen. Ted Kennedy has at least injected a note of reality regarding a subject that we humans as a race have always dealt with badly, most often through simple denial. What I wish to suggest just now is that death is too serious a subject to be sullied by wackos and clowns and crooks. In other words, it really ought to be off limits to Today's Republicans and Movement Conservatives.

I mentioned recently that my 90-year-old mother is dying, though she has shown herself to be in no rush to make the final departure. (She has been in hospice care since January of 2008.) I also mentioned that she made this whole horrible but unfortunately natural and inevitable process immeasurably easier for everyone involved -- herself, me, her health care providers -- by having a living will.

Some of you may never have seen one. It's a simple enough document.

TO MY FAMILY, MY PHYSICIAN, MY CLERGYMAN, MY LAWYER:

If the time comes when I can no longer take part in decisions for my own future, this statement and declaration shall stand as the expression of my wishes. I recognize that death is as much a reality as birth, growth, maturity, and old age -- it is but a phase in the cycle of life and is the only certainty. I do not fear death as much as I fear the indignity of deterioration, dependence, and hopeless pain. If there is no reasonable expectation of my recovery from physical or mental disability, I wish to be allowed to die and not be kept alive by artificial means or heroic measures, but wish only that drugs be mercifully administered to me for terminal suffering, even if they hasten the moment of my death.

I recognize that my wishes place a heavy burden of responsibility upon you, and I therefore make the following declaration with the intention of sharing this responsibility and this decision with you and of mitigating any feelings of guilt that you may have.

What follows is a DECLARATION that translates these beliefs into instructions, and the signatures of her and her witnesses.

I'm assuming that my mother didn't write this, that the language was provided by her lawyer after consultation regarding her wishes. But she made it clear to me in conversation that these are indeed her wishes. I see that she signed this on June 29, 1993, which would have been the week following her 74th birthday. Probably more to the point, it was the year in which my stepfather, her husband of 30 years, died -- mercifully -- of pneumonia after several grueling years of struggle with Alzheimer's.

I suppose she shouldn't have waited as long as she did to effect the living will, but I give her full credit for finally doing it. People of her time weren't brought up to do such things. At the same time, by age 74 she was able to assure me that she had a good life and she understood that when her time came, her time came. And we were lucky in that it would be another 14 1/2 years before her wishes would need to be honored. She even survived a cerebral hemorrhage in 1996, and had six or seven pretty good years after it.

(It should go without saying, but perhaps needs to be said given the caliber of minds now working this beat, that my mother could have made different choices about her end. The point is that they're her choices to make. The modern-day Right has gotten so used to imposing its own insanities on everyone else, more and more often accompanied by threats of violence, and those people are in any case so removed from the whole concept of rational decision-making, that they have no way of understanding what it means to assist people in making their own reasoned choices.)

Because we humans tend to deal so irrationally with the whole subject of death, it has taken a long time for us to develop the wisdom and maturity to deal with the host of complications that attend it. It should have been a source of consolation, even pride, to learn that provision to cover the cost of end-of-life counseling was included in the draft proposals for health care reform, and that the Department of Veterans Affairs was making available to its clients a serious book, or booklet, whatever it is, on the subject.

Instead, a cadre of the vilest, most contemptible, most hating and most hateful people in the history of the human race chose to demagogue the subject with their psychotic rampage of sliming, seeking to gain power over the people they terrified with the lies born of their own ignorance and irrationality.

I understand that the Right, having been trapped in a desperate political squeeze, where the contemptibility and irrationality of its political ideas have been so devastatingly exposed, feels that its only hope is to vilify reality and reason and substitute its framework of greedy fraudulence and psychosis, that only by ensuring that no word of truth ever escapes their foul mouths. Nevertheless, there ought to be -- as I suggested at the outset -- certain subjects that they have some residual shame to profane. It was vile when Sen. Bill Frist and like-minded poltiical whores chose to launch a crusade of lying obfuscation over the dying Terry Schiavo. If there are words to express the contempt that should have been heaped on them. It is, if anything, worse for the Sarah Palins of the world to cause such torment to people who weren't previously infected with her well-earned sense of utter worthlessness.

As Senator Kennedy's funeral approaches, with the likelihood that the Scumbag Right will attempt to politicize the grief of his mourners as they did after the funeral of the late Minnesota Paul Wellstone, I'm grateful to a colleague for calling attention to this wonderful Pandagon post by Amanda Marcotte:

Please politicize my death

I’m almost 32 and I’m in good health, so this might seem a little premature. But as the President pointed out that even young, healthy people should have living wills, the occasion of Ted Kennedy’s death --and Paul Wellstone’s before it -- makes it clear that anyone who is a liberal in the public eye at all should explicitly spell out their wishes about the “politicization” of their deaths, or else the wingnuts will declare that the only proper way to honor your legacy is to start by undermining it. So, in the event of my passing, I want it to be clear these are my wishes:

1) Please honor me by continuing to fight for the liberal causes I held dear.

2) Explicitly state in any obituaries, memorial services, etc. that what I would have wanted was to keep the fight going.

3) Impassioned speeches about the fight ahead for progressivism are especially welcome .
4) Indeed, the only way to honor my memory is to double down and fight for a better world .
5) Conservatives who don’t like this should shut the fuck up.

Obviously, I’m a mere blogger, so this is mostly irrelevant. But I’d like to get this out there in hopes of inspiring others. Hopefully, those who are truly influential to the point where wingnuts will try to use their death to undermine their legacy would be well-advised to spell out their wishes, so their survivors have a trump card.

Well said, Amanda! And an inspiration in the face of the sociopathic Rightists who will be dancing on Senator Kennedy's grave, not to mention the subtler wingnut hypocrites, if anything more obnoxious, people like Young Johnny McCranky and Orrin Hatch, who pay lip service to a man whose legacy they revile.

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