Planning for Worse Than Taxes
It is hardly surprising that a society incapable of agreeing on when life officially begins cannot agree on when life can end. What's dumbfounding after 30 years of disputed unpluggings, from Karen Ann Quinlan to the politically suspended passing of Terri Schiavo, is that enlightened Americans still prove largely incapable of drawing the obvious conclusion, taking responsibility for themselves and making advance preparations to shape their own ends.
We'll all die. But in an age of increased longevity and medical advances, death can be suspended, sometimes indefinitely, and no longer slips in according to its own immutable timetable.
So, for both patients and their loved ones, real decisions are demanded: When do we stop doing all that we can do? When do we withhold which therapies and allow nature to take its course? When are we, through our own indecision and fears of mortality, allowing wondrous medical methods to perversely prolong the dying rather than the living?
These intensely personal and socially expensive decisions should not be left to governments, judges or legislators better attuned to highway funding. Yet that is precisely what's happening this week and beyond because individuals abdicate responsibility for deciding and communicating, in advance, end-of-life values and decisions.
Schiavo left no word. What vibrant young woman or man contemplates death or, worse, suspended animation early in life? Yet that's precisely the problem. Her relatives and others elsewhere are left to fight over their own inarticulate intuitions.
Our society is exposed to commercials for personal maladies from acid indigestion to flatulence to erectile dysfunction. Yet when a comfortable Grandpa tries to discuss his end of life at a family gathering, the relatives interrupt, "Oh, Gramps, you'll outlive us all."
A loved one is diagnosed with a serious illness. Those who gather around censor themselves, for fear of insensitivity or appearing defeatist, and fail to ask how the patient would like to be treated near the end. Doctors report that the healthy are the only uncomfortable ones, that advance discussions actually give the afflicted a sense of control and peace.
