celeste_noelani | This Right To Die

A few months before my dad died, Dr. Kevorkian made headlines for assisting in Janet Adkins' death. It was all so shocking. So new. Euthanasia wasn't something that normal people talked about, except now it totally was. And I was transfixed.

Even more, I was disgusted by the 1990s hysteria, watching the debate over assisted suicide and "mercy machines" with equal parts fascination and revulsion. Who were all these people condemning patients like my father without knowing him? Without holding his hand and asking what he knew about his inability to either live or die.

I remember the twisted, painful guilt I felt upon wishing Kevorkian had hooked up Thanatron to the man eroding in my family's living room. I read articles about its gruesome elegance; medicine to induce a coma, and then medicine to stop a heart. It seemed so much gentler than all of the hopeless waiting my father did.

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