First, in the middle 1990s, I had a year of adjunct college teaching work in Flint, Mich. The place was Baker College, which had a division called "corporate services" devoted to adult college education, primarily to UAW workers using union benefits to try to get a degree before the next round of Big Three layoffs.
Well, partly due to my divinity degree, one class I was teaching was a class on issues in death and dying - religious, philosophical, medical, legal and psychological/sociological.
And, it just so happened that Kevorkian's first trial for assisted suicide was during this time, which made for an easy class assignment.
Students were told they were a "jury," and they had to clip at least one newspaper article (hey, it was 1993!) and paste it into a diary, along with at least one journal entry per week. At either the last week of class, or the week his trial wrapped up, they'd vote, like the real jury, on his fate.
From relatively conservative Catholics on to farther "left" on the religion scale, he was unanimously acquitted.
As I was in the process of moving beyond the religious beliefs with which I had been raised, the course was interesting and challenging for me, too.
Second connection?
At around the same time, I had an interview for a job in Los Angeles.
On my plane flight west? Kevorkian's mouthpiece, Geoffrey Fieger, who had not yet hit the level of total outrageousness that he did later on, as his Wiki page documents.
Despite his ever-growing ego level since the start of the Kevorkian saga, I don't doubt Fieger will indeed shed tears.
That said, I left him be in peace on the flight; the class was done, and there was no other reason to disturb his space.
Many people still ask "why" as to Kevorkian doing it. I think part of it was genuine concern. Part of it was, though, psychological issues on his part, some of them related to his Armenian background and his feeling, already then, that the Ottoman Empire's genocide of Armenians hadn't gotten due recognition.
As for those larger issues, though? William Saletan gets it about right. Kevorkian did bring this out from the shadows, but, he was lax at truly looking at his patients' needs and the best way to help them, and he overall wasn't the best "role model" for the movement of assisted suicide rights.
But, he was raising the right questions and issues:
Assisted suicide, it turns out, is a lot like abortion. No government can stop it—I would have risked jail to get the pills if necessary—and efforts to enforce its prohibition only make it less careful and humane. But, like the right to abortion, it can be abused. People want to die for all sorts of reasons. Sometimes it's agony. Sometimes it's boredom. Sometimes it's fear. Maybe your mother needs a lethal prescription. Maybe she needs antidepressants. Maybe you just need to hold her hand.Eighteen years ago, the "good Catholics" and others in my death and dying class largely agreed.
Kevorkian didn't have the answers. But he raised the right questions. We can't criticize his flaws, temper his ideas, and praise the hospice movement without acknowledging what he did. He forced an open conversation about the right to take your own life. Under what conditions, and within what limits, should that right be exercised? Even if it's legal, is it moral? What do you do when a loved one wants to die? Kevorkian didn't take those questions with him. He has left them to us.
(Sidebar; whenever I look at the Washington Post op-ed page, or glance at Faux News, I actually think Charles Krauthammer is "Dr. Death."
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