Murder by Any Other Name

Jun 6

Several years ago, during my “New Yorker phase” – I briefly subscribed to the journal (12 bucks for 12 weeks), in an attempt to be “literary” or something – I read a short story by the former Jesuit-turned-Stanford-professor/novelist John L’Heureux called The Escape. It turned out to be one of the only New Yorker stories/articles I read; like most of my phases, this one was more interesting in my head than in reality.

We are told “Eddie Pryor age twenty-one, with his black hair slick and his blue, blue eyes, enters this story with a great clatter.” He meets Millie at the Pavilion, “the place to go on Saturday nights,” after having made an embarrassing entrance down the long staircase leading to the dance floor. Millie initially wants nothing to do with him. A year later, they are married. They have two children (one dies at birth), and suffer the usual challenges of marriage, “But laughter helps, and the memory of love, and they are Catholic, so they just get on with it.” They have now grown old together.

In his old age, Eddie takes to painting in the basement. Then his left hand begins to shake, and a doctor confirms the worst: Parkinson’s.

The Parkinson’s worsens, and Eddie “could no longer laugh and, unless surprised by joy, he could barely smile.” Millie sees what is happening and makes a “secret pact with God that she would be his caretaker—both wife and nurse—no matter what the cost. She would do it. She would sacrifice her life for him. If only God would give her the strength.”

Eddie continues to decline, falling and fracturing a rib, and Millie’s “whole life now was caring for him.” When Eddie can no longer pee into the toilet, but hits the wastebasket instead, Millie becomes unhinged: “You’re a pig! That’s what you are! A filthy pig!” she screams. Eddie tells himself that Millie can’t go on like this.

Eddie begins a painting, much like his last ones: menacing rocks and craters and a barely visible crack at the center. In a fit of inspiration, he paints a crimson door in a cave.

Meanwhile, Millie decides she must put Eddie in Sunlight Nursing Home, where he will receive 24-hour care. Millie believes that “God will forgive her this betrayal of her husband, and maybe Eddie will forgive her, because of their old love, but she will never forgive herself.”

When the time comes to fetch Eddie from the basement, Millie descends the stairs, but to her surprise,

there is no sound, because Eddie is not here. He has disappeared. On his easel now stands his final painting, finished at last. The cliffs are as menacing as ever, and those gigantic stones still threaten, but at its center is a plain red door.
Eddie has escaped.

And thus the story ends. At first I was admittedly baffled by it, especially the magical realist ending, but overall I enjoyed it; the writing was good, the love and tension between Millie and Eddie plausible. Then I saw an accompanying online essay L’Heroux had written titled John L’Heureux on Death and Dignity. I read it, and felt duped.

In the essay, L’Heureux describes the heartbreak of his father’s battle with Parkinson’s disease. Then he describes his own Parkinson’s diagnosis, his slow but steady decline, and the terrible knowledge that very likely he’d develop some form of dementia, “not knowing who I was or who [my wife] was or why this nightmare had no end.” He consults his physician about California’s death-with-dignity law. He knew “the horror of going out to meet” death, but he and his wife “came to agree that, in this case, death sooner was better than death delayed.” He decides to end his own life (not suicide, he writes, but “death with dignity”), by taking a prescription concoction ironically dubbed “Feel Good Compounders.”

As a Catholic and former priest, L’Heroux was aware of the Church’s position on euthanasia, but he and his wife had convinced themselves that “we were responsible for our own lives, for the decisions we made, and for the custodianship of our own bodies. Our lives, finally, were in our own hands and the ultimate disposition of them was ours to make.” L’Heroux justifies his decision by reasoning that God “is not a divine sadist who delights in the pain of His creatures,” but instead “the God of charity and justice … the God of compassion and mercy.”

L’Heroux consumes the Feel Good Compounders on April 22, 2019, ending his life.

Although saddened and upset by the story, essay, and reality of L’Heroux’s decision, I took heart knowing that I live in Minnesota, flyover country; surely such sanctioned murder won’t come here?

How naïve of me.

Currently pending before Minnesota lawmakers is the End-of-Life Option Act SF 1813/HF 1930. The name of the bill is only the first of many lies, deceptions, and Orwellian doublespeak. The Act ought to be named the “End-Your-Life-Option Act,” or “How to Get Away With Murder.”

Some other doublespeak? The arsenic the doctor prescribes is, under the Act, labeled “medication.” And here I thought “medication” (consistent with common dictionary parlance) is a substance used for medical treatment, a drug used to help improve a particular condition or illness. The “medicine” in the Act produces death. The implication? Life is a disease. Death the cure.

The Act also talks about the “standard of care.” Among other things, the standard of care determines liability in tort and medical malpractice lawsuits. Generally, a doctor must use “reasonable care,” which is “care that meets an accepted standard of a doctor who is in a similar practice would use under similar circumstances.” Like many legal rules, this standard is intentionally opaque. Doctors make difficult judgments in difficult situations. Rightly so, society does not hold them liable for imperfect medical care, or for failed diagnoses, or treatment that doesn’t work, so long as the doctor is generally providing reasonable care. And for most of human history, “reasonable care” would exclude murder. Not anymore. Now, prescribing arsenic fits neatly within a doctor’s standard of care. In other words, the Act deems it utterly reasonable for a doctor to aid and abet murder.

No less than six times, the Act uses the phrase “peaceful death” or ending life in a “peaceful manner.” What exactly is “peace”? And what constitutes a “peaceful death?” The liturgy of the hours ends each night with the following prayer: “May the all-powerful Lord grant us a restful night and a peaceful death.” Is taking arsenic what the Church hand in mind with this prayer? I strongly suspect that suicide – the intentional taking of your life out of despair, fear, resignation, mental illness, or otherwise – is not what the phrase “peaceful death” contemplates. Rather, it is another Orwellian doublespeak. Or more aptly, the language of Beelzebub. Imagine, if you would, Beelzebub in Hell – or, as he did in the time of Job, “going to and fro on the earth, and [] walking up and down on it” – menacingly laughing as he writes this Act. That great father of lies and godfather of apes utterly delights mocking God. And here’s Satan, mocking the faithful prayer – “grant us a peaceful death” – with this horror, this anti-peaceful-death. A man-made statute the complete counterpart of the liturgy.

I will hand it to the heroes of mercy who wrote this Act. They thought of everything. If a “qualified individual” “self administers” a “prescription” “for medical aid in dying medication” in a “public place,” a government entity that incurs costs resulting from said self-administration of the “medication” in a “public place” “shall have a claim against the estate of the qualified individual” (i.e., if the government incurs costs to scoop up, transport, and dispose of the body that chose to die in public, the government gets reimbursed from the dead person’s estate). What’s really going on behind all this legal jargon? It’s this. We want you to die. But we don’t want to be reminded of your death. Do it behind closed doors. Don’t jump off a bridge, or like Svidrigailov in Crime and Punishment, blow your brains out in the street. Go to a “facility” where you can silently and quietly and in hiding die and have your body disposed of with nobody knowing.

More fictional nonsense. If you take the arsenic, you will not void your will or your life insurance policy. God forbid your financial intentions would be thwarted. Moreover, your death “shall not be designated suicide or homicide,” but rather will be “attributed to the underlying terminal disease.” Pause there a moment. If legislators can do this – call suicide not suicide, and murder not murder – what else can it do? The simple answer is anything. But maybe that’s the point. The tyranny known as natural law, aka, thou shalt not kill, or steal, or rape thy neighbor’s wife, etcetera, once and for all eradicated. If legislators can do this, why couldn’t they also say that a six-month-old is not “human,” and lopping off a six-month old’s head does not constitute murder? The simple answer is: well, they could, if they wanted to, they just need a majority vote and the John Hancock of the Governor.

But if you go down that road, you might begin to wonder: why does the Act use six months or less left to live as its benchmark? If the Act’s point is mercy, the alleviation of unnecessary suffering, then why six months? Wouldn’t it be more merciful to let someone who is going to suffer longer take the arsenic? Presumably, someone diagnosed with one year to live will suffer more than someone with six months left to live. So greater mercy to end the life of the one-yearer, right? But then if that’s the case, what about someone with five years left to live; five years of tests, and procedures, and pain, and suffering. Much more merciful to let that person take the arsenic, no? And if that’s so … well, you get the picture. This slippery slope reasoning is not farfetched. What rational distinction can be made between a six-monther and a five-yearer or a twenty-yearer, or anyone. Aren’t we, as L’Heroux wrote, “responsible for our own lives … and for the custodianship of our own bodies,” meaning “the ultimate disposition of them” is ours to make?

Finally, there is a troubling question begging inherent in the Act. Only a “qualified individual” is eligible to be prescribed the “medication.” A “qualified individual” is someone who has a “terminal disease.” A “terminal disease” “means an incurable and irreversible disease that has been medically confirmed and will, within reasonable medical judgment, produce death within six months.” Again, the war on language. But something else. A war on Christian hope. What exactly is an “incurable and irreversible disease”?

Once was we believed in miracles. The world was enchanted, and the supernatural could break through (or was always present and at times chose to reveal itself).

But that’s a bunch of nonsense, right? Reason, science, and commonsense rule the day; witches, cauldrons, magic, demons, angels, spells, and prayer have been forgotten on that dusty shelf known as the Dark Ages. We rely on medicine, not miracles.

And yet.

The Catholic Church keeps making saints. And that requires miracles. Two, if I understand the requirements for entry correctly (except in the case of martyrdom). Sure, you can do the whole postmodern cynical thing and say the Church is lying to everyone, power hungry, manufacturing miracles to continue to dupe its adherents. That’s possible I suppose. But start looking into the claims. Time and again, “incurable” diseases, cured. Consecrated hosts bleed. The stigmata. People even brought back from the dead.

You don’t need to believe it. But let me ask you this: is your life better for not believing in the impossible? For not believing in miracles? Is your life better for telling a sick person, a vulnerable person, one who has six months left to live or less: we agree, you are better off dead. Go ahead. Take the arsenic. You are incurable. And we won’t judge you. We won’t even call it suicide. Or murder. Or killing. In fact, we’ll tell ourselves you had a peaceful death. Don’t you want that? A peaceful death?

Count me out.

For all the violence that words and phrases such as “Feel Good Compounders,” and “peaceful death,” and “death with dignity,” and “medication” that kills does to the English language, it is surely not the greatest violence here. That violence is the murder itself. For let us not delude ourselves. Murder it is.

John L’Heroux did not have a peaceful death.

Unlike Eddie, he did not simply disappear. No gnostic escape into pure spirit. How do we know? Because he left a body behind. A body that he killed. A body that his doctors aided and abetted in murdering.

The body remains. Which is why the great humanitarian legislators don’t want you to take the arsenic in public. Why?

Because you don’t simply escape. You die. And you leave your body behind, to rot.

The body, a scandal to 21st century humans. How have we not evolved beyond the body? Why do we still die? Why does our flesh still decompose?

Don’t get me wrong. Death is a scandal. It is horrible. In death, we sense failure, loss, catastrophe, our inability ultimately to control. We sense it shouldn’t be this way.

But the antidote to death is not death. We need to face reality. We can’t conquer death. But Christ has already conquered death, the last enemy to be destroyed, as Paul says. Back to that demonic aping. Christ died on the cross for all. He conquered death through death. And Satan now apes Christ, telling us we can conquer death by death. You choose when to die. But here’s the thing: we’re not God. We are created, he is Creator. We have limits. And Minnesota’s End-of-Life-Option Act is a dreadful overstepping of our limits. And believe it or not, there are brutal consequences for those who overstep the limits imposed by the Creator upon his creation. Human history is replete with proof of these consequences. Like Raskolnikov, none of us gets away with murder. Sooner or later, now or in the hereafter, we will be brought to account. And when we are, we can get on our knees and plead for mercy, true mercy, not the sort of mercy embedded in the End-of-Life Option Act. But lest we forget, the measure of mercy we give, will be the measure of mercy we receive.