c. 1997 · Positional essay — on machines that breathe for the dying.
The white walls of the room exude a peroxide smell. Every surface has been sprayed with an antiseptic. Spartan and sterile, this is what Jeremy Holmstadt calls home. Jeremy has been diagnosed with a terminal illness, one that is incurable, but will take years to finally kill him. Jeremy is dependant upon an apparatus not unlike a nightmarish vision of Robbie the Robot. Various electrodes on Jeremy’s body monitor his vital signs, and snake-like tubes penetrate his airways. His family hopes for a cure, but physicians have already expressed to them that even if Jeremy is brought from his incapacitated state he will remain a vegetable. Is it ethical and even worthwhile to perpetuate a life that will never again be cognizant of its own existence?
Let’s take for example the situation of the late Bryan Mendelssohn. He had been diagnosed with a brain tumor that had put him in a comatose condition that left his autonomic functions impaired. His family had brought him to the medical authorities for treatment, but the doctors, having exhausted all means available to them to restore him, relegated him to a machine that would facilitate respiratory functions. For the next ten years, Bryan was kept alive via the machine and finally died one morning. The costs the family incurred to keep Bryan alive surpassed four hundred thousand dollars. They paid far more in mental and emotional distress. When his wife was asked whether or not she had been hoping for that day to arrive, she answered: “I have been waiting for today to happen for ten years. I knew Bryan would not have wanted us to suffer this way.” (Oxford Journal of Medicine, 1996, Vol 3, pg 123.)
On March 10, 1989, Shannon Rhodes was hit by a drunken driver on a busy freeway. She was left in a comatose state as a result of the incident, whereafter she was revived and had an opportunity to talk with her doctors and family. She made it clear after being told that she was likely to relapse into a permanent coma that she would rather leave her life in the hands of god than be put on a life-sustaining machine. When she did relapse and doctors were going to honor her wishes, media intervened and the question of whether or not to allow someone to die was submitted for arbitration. She was put onto artificial preservation during that time period, and when the courts decided that medical authorities were to at any expense or situation preserve a person’s life the family was devastated. Shannon Rhodes remained on the machine until her death on April 5, 1991. (Seliquini, pg 91.)
When the wife of Patrick McNeely was asked how she felt about sustaining the life of her husband, who was suffering the last stages of a mind-delibitating disease, she asked that her husband be allowed to die in a respectful manner, rather than to leave him attached to a machine that would breathe for him, pump his blood, and maintain his bowel movements. The doctors consented to her wishes, and Patrick died that night.
One asks himself whether the choice of allowing someone to die should ever be asked, that perhaps one should always do his best and utmost to prevent death. The question becomes more complicated when one faces the fact that although alive, a person may be completely detached from the world, without thought, without feeling. What constitutes death?
Composed 1997 · part of the Essays collection · authorship documented on the Provenance page.