PBS's 'Before I Die' A 'seminar' on euthanasia makes for surprisingly informative TV
McConnell, Frank
Frank McConnell DEATH ON TRIAL PBS's 'Before I Die' Man has "invented death," wrote Yeats, and the poet was absolutely right: As the only animals who know that we will die, we are also the only...
...Remarkably, the doctors, nurses, ethicists, and ministers all agree that choosing death, even in extremis, is an unacceptable option, however alluring it may sometimes be...
...I said that the scenarios were calibrated...
...The question is whether we can ever really return to that insight, or whether we have, irreversibly, traded the concept of "death" for that of "autopsy...
...If's treated, but it comes back, and metastasizes to other parts of her body...
...he doesn't want to die now...
...By quantifying death, we have "de-qualified" it, robbed it of its ancient status as, not simply the cessation of life, but its consummation...
...It's been suggested-and I believe it-that the birth of consciousness is really the birth of the consciousness of mortality...
...It is one of the "Fred Friendly Seminars," those open-ended, frank, and articulate discussions of important matters that have graced PBS with their intelligence since 1984...
...But how do you oppose euthanasia (Greek eu = "pleasant" + thana-tos = "death") when medicine, in its triumphant, indeed explosive progress, is continually blurring the very definition of thanatos...
...Radical mastectomy, chemotherapy, everything is employed-but still the cancer is there, and spreading, and she is going to die...
...you don't got the bread, you die...
...Friendly is one of the truly great men in the history of television...
...Before I Die: Medical Care and Personal Choices," which airs April 22 on PBS (check local listings), is a panel discussion-WNET New York, the parent station, calls it a "seminar"-about jus!: this riddle...
...The participants also, astonishingly, all agree that the root of the dilemma is not technological but spiritual...
...My dearest classmate from Notre Dame (1964) suffered a massive coronary on the streets of Oklahoma City eight years after graduation...
...along with Edward R. Mur-row, he made TV news the noble thing it once was...
...Does her physician attempt "experimental techniques" to prolong her life, or does he concentrate on measures to ease her pain in her last days...
...And then he has a catastrophic stroke, and is hooked up to the machine...
...Since he was from a family of millionaires, he was put on life support even though all brain functions had ceased...
...I disagree, but this is not the right venue to argue my case...
...Now, in the first place, I've always thought that "role playing" was a goofy evasion of responsibility: If grown-ups can't talk, then they're not really grownups...
...And what is her say in this...
...But they do depict situations that occur every day...
...Miller, wielding his coffee mug like a scepter of office, struts before the seated panelists and asks them to "role-play" various scenarios about death, dying, family, and finances...
...The three proposed scenarios, delicately calibrated, gradually increase the urgency-and difficulty-of making decisions about death in our current medical and ethical fog...
...As Milan Kundera says, all the other animals still live in an eternal present-in Eden...
...At century's end, though, the fact of death has taken on an unprecedented and distressing complexity...
...First case: A young mother has breast cancer...
...And is the directive really legal if, maybe (but who can tell...
...And this was humane...
...Arthur Miller of Harvard Law School is the host and master of ceremonies, and a more cloyingly self-satisfied one-except if it were Phil Donohue-would be hard to imagine...
...It was more than a decade later when I read that prayers were requested for his repose...
...This was moral...
...As technology spreads ever wider its wings-angelic or demonic-we're less and less sure what death is, when it actually occurs, and, most frighteningly, when to declare it...
...There are fourteen panelists on the show, including doctors, nurses, philosophers, a rabbi, and a minister...
...And, in the second place, I'd bet the ranch that Brother Miller didn't have a damn thing in his coffee mug during the taping, and props that are just props tick me off...
...Before I Die," sometimes silly but often fine, is an important contribution to the conversation...
...And what about the fact that her HMO may well offer her a fat sum (for her kids' education) to refuse treatment and die sooner rather than later...
...And where, sufferer or caregiver, in the face of that immitigable enormity, are your abstract principles now...
...Frank McConnell DEATH ON TRIAL PBS's 'Before I Die' Man has "invented death," wrote Yeats, and the poet was absolutely right: As the only animals who know that we will die, we are also the only animals subject to anxiety, hope, religion, and the future tense...
...And they also agree that the American health-care system is a galloping disaster, having turned "death"-whatever that means now- into a marketable commodity, as in "you got the bread, we'll keep you alive...
...But his physician convinces him to sign an "advance directive"-a statement that, if he is ever incapacitated beyond reasonable hope and on a life-support machine, the machine should be turned off...
...In other words, somebody had finally pulled the plug, cut off the IV, pushed the off button...
...This, in fact, is fact...
...So you can invert Yeats's proposition: Death has invented Man...
...Second case: An older guy, sixty-five or so, is still in the pink of health...
...So how much does the "advance directive" really count-especially if his children are at odds about whether to let him die or not...
...Flawed and occasionally maddening as the show is, it is eminently worth watching...
...The Catholic position-and the position of most churches-is flexible about discontinuing "useless" medical intervention, but unalterably opposed to euthanasia...
...This is pretty close to the situation of my Notre Dame friend...
...But despite the creakiness of the setup, the hour produces discussion of real value...
...Third case: A guy has advanced AIDS...
...He checks into a hospice, but still wants his doctor to promise him that, when the time comes, he will be provided the means to end his own life with something like dignity, something other than the howling chaos and loss of self which death from AIDS often is...
Vol. 124 • April 1997 • No. 8
