The Undertaking Read online

  And here, the dialogue seems oddly hushed. Is it possible we are just too busy, just don’t care? Are we willing to leave it to the experts?

  No member of my generation: that demographic aneurysm called the Baby Boom, should miss the hapless irony that the first generation to plan its parenthood, to manage and manipulate its fertility, may well be the first generation to have our deaths planned for us, our morality managed and manipulated by our own children, those who survived the gauntlet of our choices. Likewise, we can depend upon them to make their choices the way we’ve made ours: by convenience and expedience and five-year plans, efficiency and function and high performance, quality time and available resources. Less, we’ve always lied to them, is more! Maybe we shouldn’t have fooled Mother Nature. Maybe we just should have played whatever numbers came up, instead.

  “What do you think about ball caps and windbreakers?”

  Uncle Eddie was thinking about uniforms.

  “In dark, dark green, you know, it’s all the rage. And three S’s embroidered tastefully in gold? Inside a pyramid design? You know. Classic. Timeless. Very professional. Whaddaya think?”

  I cautioned him about expenses and cash-flow. Better to start small. Get a few jobs under his belt, some money in the bank, and work up to full uniforms. “You’ve got to walk before you run,” I said.

  He’d been pushed to the limit by a rash of bad ones. A murder-suicide involving kitchenware and large-caliber handguns in an apartment complex south of town had been, for Triple S, a sad bonanza in terms of on-the-job training and accounts receivable. He’d already invested in gloves and face masks, protective goggles and disposable footwear for his staff. He’d leased a van, also in deep forest green, and outfitted it with buckets and mops and cleaning solutions. He’d purchased ozone machines for the removal of odors and had contracts and invoices printed up. He’d had training sessions with his staff, instructing them on the discreet discharge of their duties, the importance of team work, high standards of performance, the disposal of biohazards, the possibility of a Christmas party, bonuses, the avoidance of bloodborne pathogens and other exposures. He’d paid for their hepatitis B vaccinations. He’d given them beepers and name badges.

  Like AIDS and alcoholism, suicide has a certain contagion. Why? is the question it always poses and when no sufficient answer is given, Why not? is what we ask rhetorically, trying to bring the outrage into the realm of the sensible. To make self killing “understandable,” “forgivable,” one need only see it as the last remarkable and fatal symptom of a life-threatening illness, a fatal disease—depression or melancholia. But to make it “permissible,” legal, an inalienable right, we must argue against the absolute value of life. It must become “relative,” “negotiable,” a matter of opinion, open to various interpretations. We proclaim it an option—a matter of “choice.” To be or not to be, becomes, like smoking or non-smoking, window or aisle seat, the choice of salad dressing or type of wine, a matter of individual taste, situation, and circumstance—answerable to public opinion, provincial ordinance, or political reality, perhaps, but no longer the province of Nature or Divinity.

  We have done as much with the matter of birth and parenting, dividing ourselves into different teams—pro-Thisers or pro-Thaters—with no middle ground, as there seldom is in matters of life and death. The debate is controlled by the extremes, each side shouting answers and accusations over the heads of the people in between, who are kept from formulating questions by the din of the argument all around them. Each paints the other with a broader brush. Each has an arsenal of names and adjectives to deploy against the other side. No one listens. Everyone screams.

  Why leave a mess? Call TRIPLE S! is the slogan Uncle Eddie invented. He had it printed in 22-point Mead Bold gold letters on a dark green background along with his 800-number (1-800-668-4464), made into kitchen-magnet cards and mailed them out in batches by the half-dozen to police and fire stations, funeral homes, and the county morgues here in southeastern lower Michigan. He included a cover letter that made mention of his round-the-clock cellular dispatch, his willingness to work with insurance companies, his highly-trained and professional staff, his free on-site quotations. Key words like body fluids, bloodborne pathogens, tissues, putrefaction, maggots, intermingled with disinfection, restoration, cleanliness, and discretion to make the case for why they should call Specialized Sanitation Services, Inc.; at the bottom of which letterhead Uncle Eddie signed his name under which he typed out Founder and President.

  Before he knew it the phone began to ring—once or twice a month at first, then once or twice a week. “They’re dying to see me!” Uncle Eddie said. There was the occasional murder that called for his attention, or the old timers dead but undiscovered—one old man died on the floor of his bungalow in August and wasn’t found for most of a month after which a floor sander and kerosene were added to Uncle Eddie’s supplies. But for the most part Triple S relied on the grisly and violent homemade suicides, which erred on the side of excess and overkill, to cover the fixed costs of the enterprise.

  After six months of bedrooms and bathtubs and basements, car trunks, hotel rooms, and offices, Uncle Eddie was dreaming of franchising and helicopters, to extend the coverage of Triple S, Inc.

  It was June of 1990 when one of our local “characters” here in Oakland County, an unemployed pathologist and failed movie mogul, put Janet Adkins in his rusting minibus, drove her out to Groveland Township, a few miles north of here, then showed her the button on his “Thanatron”—a gizmo he’d rigged from garage-sale parts to give a lethal injection of potassium chloride: a suicide machine. She pushed the button. The machine worked. Machines do. Janet Adkins was taken to the county morgue where a thoracic and cranial autopsy was done. Jack Kevorkian was taken to the county jail, a floor above her in the same building. Then Janet was taken to the crematory at Evergreen Cemetery and burned into oblivion and Jack got his picture on the cover of Time. So everyone got what it was they wanted.

  Except Uncle Eddie who was beside himself. “Who’s this fellow Dr. Death?” he hollered. “And why is he trying to put me out of business?” The small blood vessels in his head were bulging. He was pointing at the story in the daily paper.

  I told him it had nothing to do with Triple S. But my younger brother, ever the visionary, said it was a genuine threat. He went on to explain that tidy, bloodless, medically supervised and assisted suicides would make his Specialized Sanitation Services redundant, his mop and bucket crews as obsolete as typewriters or telegraphs. “The handwriting’s on the wall,” he sighed. “It’s only a matter of time.”

  I told him not to lose hope. Surely Kevorkian would go to jail or to the asylum. Injecting poisons was against the law. Clearly, suicide was not medicinal, though it was powerfully effective against all pains: physical, spiritual, and psychological; it was more murderous than remedial. “Assisted suicide” like “holy war” is an oxymoronic romance that seeks to make killing sound like kindness or courtesy or a good cause. Folks would soon go back to the old trusted solo ways—pills, gas stoves, bridge abutments, firearms—which made up in raw individual tidings whatever they lacked in tidiness.

  Recent history has proven me wrong, dead wrong, wrong again.

  By the end of 1996 Jack had assisted in nearly fifty “medicides” and was the darling of the deathly set of euthanasists, do-it-yourselfers, and radical empiricists that keep homepages on the Internet you can access by searching under suicide. The DeathNet they call it. You can try this at home.

  Uncle Eddie says it’s not the suicide. We’ve always had that. It’s the assistance that there is a market for. Janet Adkins didn’t need the help. Not with the killing part. She had the physical resources to swallow pills, pull a trigger, start a car, turn on the gas stove and thus avail herself of traditional methods. She had the psychological resources to overcome her fear of dying, a fear like the fear of any unknown. She had the spiritual resources to understand that God or Whatever Is Out There would,
by virtue of its job description, understand her. What she lacked was the voice to shout down her own voices that whispered to her the case for living—part nature part nurture, the voice that says to take life, however painful and imperfect, does damage to the rest of life. Dr. Jack with his half-baked rationality and his jerry-rigged contraption—his Thanatron—and his ethically neutered lexicon made Janet his patient and poison, the treatment, and what they were doing, medicide; proving yet again the modern axiom that the big lie is easier to sell than the small one. By all the equipment he made it seem that his assistance had to do with method. By the mid-afternoon in early June in north Oakland County, in the back of his van, it all must have seemed normal, natural, a right and entitlement, a matter of choice, protected by the Constitution, maybe someday worthy of public funding. “Have a nice trip,” he had told her, after she had done her part, as if she were off to the Bahamas or the Berkshires.

  That great minds think alike is not a certainty. While Jack Kevorkian pursued his immortality—gladdened by his attorney’s suggestion that his name recognition fell just south of Santa Claus, pleased with the attention of talk show hosts and PBS—Uncle Eddie saw only an eventual failure, a new world order in which suicide was no more messy than dentistry, the end of the line for Triple S.

  After three trials here in Oakland County failed to convict or restrain Dr. Kevorkian, after the county prosecutor was voted out of office for spending tax dollars bringing the doctor to court (Dr. Jack prepared a lethal injection for Elizabeth Mercz, age 59, of Cincinnati, on election day to signal his acceptance of the mandate the voters seemed to be giving him. He delivered her body to the hospital just after the polls had closed), and after two federal district courts had ruled in favor of assisted suicide and motions were brought to bring it to the Supreme Court, Uncle Eddie pulled the plug on Triple S. He boxed up the kitchen magnets and coffee mugs, the memo pads with his logo and slogan, the ball caps and windbreakers, laid off his staff and answering service and sold the van, and sent a letter, full of regrets, to the agencies that had formerly called him.

  And sad as I was for Uncle Eddie, all that night I tossed and turned among gray images of suicides I’d known. The boy who went out in the woods and hung himself and wasn’t found until hunting season. The man with cancer and a deer rifle who sat with the barrel under his chin considering his options for an hour, making his case to the video-cam, then pulled the trigger. How bits of his skull were wedged into the wormwood panelling. His wife would find them afterward, for months, and call me wondering what she should do. And why it was he never turned the camera off.

  Or the pills and booze crowd, mostly women, who washed down handfuls of antidepressants with half bottle chasers of Absolut. How one got dressed up in her wedding gown and did the same damage with pink champagne, her careful handwriting turning to scrawl: “I’m sorry. I love you. I’m in such pain….” And the household poisonings, rat killers, drain openers, paint thinners, liquid bleach—how the bodies would come to us foaming tiny white bubbles from every orifice.

  The girl who climbed up the water tower. We would have counted her an accident until the medical examiner found breaks and fractures from her hips to heels. “You fall head first,” he said. “Feet first’s a jump.” Multiple Injuries he ruled it—Suicide. I remember that poor child’s family—each of them wondering what it was they’d done or failed to do or could have, should have, might have, would have surely done if they’d only known whatever it was that drove her up and down. Damned if they did or if they didn’t, they went their own ways after that, alone. Or the woman who holed up in her room with a hot plate and her toddlers and a gun for days before she let the children out with a note for their father; then she shot herself. He loved and hated her ever after. Or the friend of mine who lay between his Buick’s dual exhausts and breathed and breathed till he was out of breath and at a loss to say exactly what it was went wrong. There were, of course, the usual theories. Overbearing parents. A loss of faith. Confusion over sexuality. His troublesome madness? Genius? Either way, he’s long since gone. His wounded people, still hungry for answers, stumble after him, with the lameness that comes from a foot in the grave.

  Each of these suffered a strain of the sickness, the sadness that lies to the one who has it—the one that says it will never get better, no safe harbor, no choice in the matter, no available kindness but to quit. It’s the sickness that makes its victims listless, hopeless, helpless, lifeless as stones. It’s the grim indifference I’ve seen in the eyes of my own darling son once that made me shiver—the sense that I’ve had since that he could do it. He has the hurt, the deafness, and blindness for it—the will, despite all that we know of love, to go that distance utterly alone: the determination I have always admired and I have always feared.

  Unlike Janet Adkins from Portland, Oregon, or Linda Henslee from Beloit, Wisconsin, or Esther Cohan from Skokie, Illinois, or Catherine Andreyev from Pennsylvania or Ruth Neuman from Columbus, New Jersey, or Lona D. Jones from Cheser, Virginia, or Bette Lou Hamilton from Ohio or Patricia Cashman, Jonathan D. Grenz and Martha Jane Ruwart—all Californians—or dozens of others who made their ways across the country or the county line, still unable to take the final fatal steps alone. We call it helpful, here in Michigan, to give the gas, to slip the needle in.

  Perhaps it is our nature to die, not our right. Maybe we have the ability to kill, to make things dead, even ourselves, but we haven’t the right. And when we exercise that ability, in the name of God (as we have done in war), or of Justice (as we have done with capital punishment), or of Choice (as we have with abortion), we should have the good sense to recognize it for what it isn’t: enlightenment, civilization, progress, mercy. Nor is it an inalienable right. It is, rather, a shame, a sadness, a peril from which no congress’s legislation, no churchman’s dispensation, no public opinion or conventional wisdom can ever deliver us. For if we live in a world where birth is suspect, where the value of life is relative, and death is welcomed and well regarded, we live in a world vastly more shameful, abundantly sadder, and ever more perilous than all the primitive generations of our species before us who were sufficiently civilized to fill with wonder at the birth of new life, dance with the living, and weep for the dead.

  Is a suicide less a killing than a homicide? When the killer and the one killed are one and the same, does it mitigate the offense of killing? And while a suicide may successfully thumb a nose at the rest of us, and may be welcomed into whatever heavens are out there by whatever merciful gods there are, some things really should be done on one’s own. For suicide to be a sui-cide (a killing of one’s self by one’s self) it really ought to be done without assistance, without license, and without a moral proxy or surrogate. Does the ability to end life on our own terms suggest the right to do so, anymore than my ability to piss on my neighbor’s daylilies implies an inalienable right to do so?

  Few people are drawn to the discussion of such things. The folks I have coffee with most mornings in town are not so much “for” Kevorkian as indifferent to him. It is a sample heavily weighted with males—retirees and attorneys and small businessmen. Maybe it is only a sign of the times. Even when, after the excitement of the trials was over, Dr. Jack started delivering bodies to local hospitals, in keeping, according to one forensic psychiatrist, with the profile of serial killers who kill and dump and who need increasing doses of risk and stimuli; even when former jurors began to voice doubts; even when Dr. Jack applied for a concealed weapons permit, no one seemed to be much bothered. Of course, the dead were almost exclusively women, none of them local, none of them known to us, none of them young enough to interest anyone.

  The absence of outrage is an outrage itself.

  I should say what it is I am not saying here. I am not saying that we may not kill ourselves. We may, of course. Free Will is the name we give to this. We can likewise refuse any and all treatment designed to prolong our life or prevent our death. Whole segments of the population will never
have to endure these “extraordinary measures”—not by choice but by simple economy. We don’t have to wait until we’re dying to do this. We can begin today. Just say No thank you. Just say Goodbye. I am not saying that we won’t go to Heaven, or Las Vegas or into the void on account of these decisions, whatever they are. Nor am I suggesting that we endure any pain for which there is a medicine or treatment.