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| Patricia Moore read a poem to her husband in the intensive-care unit. She stood beside him wearing a surgical gown, holding the dog-eared book in her latex gloves.
Through her surgical mask came the tender, muffled words of "Knee-deep in June," by James Whitcomb Riley: Orchard's where I'd ruther be - Needn't fence it in fer me! Gene Moore lay before her, unconscious. An IV line entered a vein in his neck and ran through his heart, into the pulmonary artery. It measured blood flow and carried five medicines into his infected body. A ventilator tube ran like a garden hose down his throat. A feeding tube pushed through his nose and into his stomach. Bags on his legs inflated and deflated every few minutes to prevent clotting. A catheter drained urine from his bladder. He wore orthotic boots to keep his feet bent so that, should he ever, miraculously, get out of bed, this retired 63-year-old steelworker would be able to stand. Mrs. Moore stood beside her husband of 44 years, her heart aching with indecision. Were she and her two sons doing the right thing putting him through this torture? Or should they stop? Should they tell the doctors to let him die? |
MEDICINE HAS GOTTEN so good at keeping people alive that Americans increasingly must decide how and when they will die. They must choose if death will come in a hospital room with beeping machines and blinking monitors or if it will come at home, with hospice workers blunting the fear and pain that so often accompany the final hours. And soon, they may have a remarkable choice: Will they kill themselves with their doctor's help? Americans are demanding options because they are beginning to care as much about the quality of their death as the length of their life. They want control at the end. They want a humane death, a good death. Throughout the country, in hospitals and medical schools and courtrooms and statehouses, reformers are pushing hard to improve the way Americans die. Already, they have won the right for families to turn off ventilators, hold back life-sustaining drugs, and even take out feeding tubes. Nearly 400,000 Americans every year now seek a tranquil death through hospice. Since 1982, when Medicare began covering hospice care, the cost has grown to $2 billion this year. Six years ago, the world had not heard of Jack Kevorkian. This year two federal appeals courts ruled that patients have a right to assisted suicide. The issue now stands before the U.S. Supreme Court. With this quest for control have come difficult ethical, social and personal decisions that Americans are only beginning to wrestle with. |
Wendell Kennedy and Betty Pryor at their mother's side in intensive care.
Rose Kennedy's son Wendell and daughter Betty Pryor wait for word about her condition with her great-grandson, Antwain Wynn. "It's just so hard to make a decision," said Pryor, who was designated by Mrs. Kennedy's living will to act in her behalf. |
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