[lit-ideas] Living Wills
- From: "Andreas Ramos" <andreas@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "Lit-Ideas" <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 1 Apr 2005 10:44:52 -0800
Living will is the best revenge
By ROBERT FRIEDMAN
March 27, 2005,
http://www.sptimes.com/2005/03/27/Columns/Living_will_is_the_be.shtml
Like many of you, I have been compelled by recent events to prepare a more
detailed advance
directive dealing with end-of-life issues.
Here's what mine says:
* In the event I lapse into a persistent vegetative state, I want medical
authorities to
resort to extraordinary means to prolong my hellish semiexistence. Fifteen
years wouldn't be
long enough for me.
* I want my wife and my parents to compound their misery by engaging in a
bitter and
protracted feud that depletes their emotions and their bank accounts.
* I want my wife to ruin the rest of her life by maintaining an interminable
vigil at my
bedside. I'd be really jealous if she waited less than a decade to start dating
again or
otherwise rebuilding a semblance of a normal life.
* I want my case to be turned into a circus by losers and crackpots from around
the country
who hope to bring meaning to their empty lives by investing the same transient
emotion in me
that they once reserved for Laci Peterson, Chandra Levy and that little girl
who got stuck
in a well.
* I want those crackpots to spread vicious lies about my wife.
* I want to be placed in a hospice where protesters can gather to bring further
grief and
disruption to the lives of dozens of dying patients and families whose stories
are sadder
than my own.
* I want the people who attach themselves to my case because of their deep
devotion to the
sanctity of life to make death threats against any judges, elected officials or
health care
professionals who disagree with them.
* I want the medical geniuses and philosopher kings who populate the Florida
Legislature to
ignore me for more than a decade and then turn my case into a forum for weeks
of politically
calculated bloviation.
* I want total strangers - oily politicians, maudlin news anchors, ersatz
friars and all
other hangers-on - to start calling me "Bobby," as if they had known me since
childhood.
* I'm not insisting on this as part of my directive, but it would be nice if
Congress passed
a "Bobby's Law" that applied only to me and ignored the medical needs of tens
of millions of
other Americans without adequate health coverage.
* Even if the "Bobby's Law" idea doesn't work out, I want Congress - especially
all those
self-described conservatives who claim to believe in "less government and more
freedom" - to
trample on the decisions of doctors, judges and other experts who actually know
something
about my case. And I want members of Congress to launch into an extended debate
that gives
them another excuse to avoid pesky issues such as national security and the
economy.
* In particular, I want House Majority Leader Tom DeLay to use my case as an
opportunity to
divert the country's attention from the mounting political and legal troubles
stemming from
his slimy misbehavior.
* And I want Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist to make a mockery of his Harvard
medical
degree by misrepresenting the details of my case in ways that might give a
boost to his 2008
presidential campaign.
* I want Frist and the rest of the world to judge my medical condition on the
basis of a
snippet of dated and demeaning videotape that should have remained private.
* Because I think I would retain my sense of humor even in a persistent
vegetative state,
I'd want President Bush - the same guy who publicly mocked Karla Faye Tucker
when signing
off on her death warrant as governor of Texas - to claim he was intervening in
my case
because it is always best "to err on the side of life."
* I want the state Department of Children and Families to step in at the last
moment to take
responsibility for my well-being, because nothing bad could ever happen to
anyone under
DCF's care.
* And because Gov. Jeb Bush is the smartest and most righteous human being on
the face of
the Earth, I want any and all of the aforementioned directives to be
disregarded if the
governor happens to disagree with them. If he says he knows what's best for me,
I won't be
in any position to argue.
Robert Friedman is editor of Perspective. He can be reached at
friedman@xxxxxxxxxxx
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