Thank You, Dr. Kevorkian

by Diane Dimond 

Hardly a day goes by that I don’t remember holding my stricken mother’s hand as she laid on a special hospital bed we had set up in her living room. It was there she took her last breath. Almost every day I think about how my father died in the bedroom of the home he loved so much. Both my parents passed away exactly how they lived – on their own terms. 

They wanted no heroic measures to prolong their lives and they adamantly told me – their only child – that they did not want to die in a cold, impersonal hospital room. They made me promise to abide by their wishes. And just in case, they signed a living will putting it all in writing. I thank Dr. Jack Kevorkian for that. He started the national dialogue about death that opened up the topic for discussion in my household.

When Kevorkian started down the path that ultimately earned him the nickname “Dr. Death” it was the early 80′s. He wrote a series of articles on the ethics of euthanasia for a German journal called Medicine and Law. In 1987, he hung out a shingle in Michigan as a physician available for consultation on “death counseling.” His first publicly revealed assisted suicide occurred in 1990 when he helped an Alzheimer’s patient take her life. She, like many other of his patients, was not terminal. But, she was suffering and for Kevorkian that was enough. 

“What difference does it make I’d someone is terminal,” he once said during an interview with CNN. “We are all terminal.” Truer words were never spoken. 

Jack Kevorkian, the son of Armenian immigrants, believed every person held the ultimate decision making power over their own life and death should be a dignified event. Yet, his legacy will likely be focused only on his stand on physician assisted suicide. Once asked what it felt like to take someone’s life Kevorkian said, “I didn’t do it to end a life. I did it to end the suffering the patient’s going through. The patient’s obviously suffering — what’s a doctor supposed to do, turn his back?"

Kevorkian wasn’t perfect in his judgment, as he assisted more than 130 people to end their lives, but I’m not one that believes he had self aggrandizement in mind. Like my parents, Kevorkian believed a mentally competent patient should always be in charge of his or her fate. The justice system may have branded him a criminal but it is clear he singlehandedly made generations of both young and older Americans think about their final moment.

When Kevorkian began to publicly preach about “the right to die” in Michigan in the early 90′s my parents in Albuquerque, New Mexico became disciples. Both Mom and Dad were the type who didn’t use twenty words if ten would do. They sat me down and bluntly told me they believed they – alone – should be in charge of their own lives right up until the moment of their deaths. They showed me their living will and made me promise.

My parents never faltered in their resolve – not even after Dr. Kevorkian had his medical license pulled by the state of Michigan or after he was sentenced to 10 to 25 years in prison on second degree murder charges in 1999. Kevorkian’s book Prescription: Medicide, The Goodness of Planned Death was in my father’s library. Included within was Kevorkian’s idea that executed prisoners should be put to death in a certain way so as to preserve their organs for donation to others. You see, he wasn’t all about death. 

By the time Kevorkian was released from prison on parole in June 2007 on his promise that he would never assist in another suicide both my parents were gone. But their life and death lesson remains indelibly etched in my soul. Because I watched them depart this earth marching to the drummer of their own choosing, I find I don’t fear death like I used to. I’m now able to look at it as a next adventure.

It’s ironic to think that at the end of his life Dr. Kevorkian did not choose the course toward death that he’d preached to so many. He died in a hospital in Royal Oak, Michigan after a month long battle with kidney problems and pneumonia. He was 83. He never married and had no children. His life became all about the death of others.