“This will be my last campaign,” Booth Gardner said. “This will be the biggest fight of my career.” He walked along the lane between the beach of driftwood and his compound of houses. The driftwood clotted the shore; it was the end of summer now, and the cove was still, but in winter massive branches and trunks churn up out of the water of Puget Sound. Bone-white roots clawed at the air on this late afternoon; Gardner’s grandchildren climbed across them. His walk was a vigorous lurch. One foot twisted inward, one knee buckled. His torso keeled slightly with each step. He has Parkinson’s. He was governor of Washington State for two terms in the 1980s and ’90s. He is 71, and his last campaign is driven by his desire to kill himself. “I can’t see where anybody benefits by my hanging around,” he told me, while his blond grandchildren, sticks prodding, explored the water’s edge.
From the beach on Vashon Island, where Gardner spends much of his summers, not far from Seattle, he drove me to the island’s town. His Lexus was cluttered with debris: a crushed soda can, a tattered magazine put out by a local pollster, an old plastic cup from McDonald’s, a torn T-shirt, sunglasses missing a lens. Wearing a gray fleece, he led me into a simple restaurant with rustic décor. Full cheeks and green eyes impish, he chatted with the waitress and tried to start conversations with the people at tables around us. “You’re not having dessert?” he asked a young couple immersed in each other. Almost everyone seemed to recognize him, and almost everyone was friendly ”” he’d been the state’s most popular governor in recent decades. But it wasn’t always clear how interested they were in talking. The young couple gazed back at him, perplexed. It was 14 years since he’d been in office.
“Why do this?” he asked, turning from the other tables toward me. “I want to be involved in public life. I was looking for an issue, and this one fell in my lap. One advantage I have in this thing is that people like me. The other” ”” his leprechaun eyes lost their glint; his fleshy cheeks seemed to harden, his lips to thin, his face to reshape itself almost into a square ”” “is that my logic is impeccable. My life, my death, my control.”
My life, my death, my control.
Aside from the obvious theological problem embodied in this sentence, I have to ask: if it’s your death, why do you need a doctor to help you? You want to kill yourself, there are a hundred way to do it without taking the integrity of the medical profession with you.
My thoughts exactly, #1. This seems to be little more than moral exhibitionism, like that hilarious Onion story about Marilyn Manson being reduced to going door-to-door trying to shock people.
Thank you DF and Jeffersonian. Apparently people want OTHER PEOPLE to take the responsibility for doing the deed, even though it is “My life, my death, my control” . . .
Ditto #1, There are few things as odd as a retired wealthy liberal politician wandering around in public fervently desiring suicide. On the other hand, I *do* see the similarity to Anglicanism…..
Moral exhibitionism is the very phrase. He wants his dying to be publicly praised so that it is necessary to campaign for it before he dies. He is looking at his death as the last election he will win, and his biggest. This is repellent. And I agree with #1, that it is wholly unprincipled for a doctor to have had direct hand in his death. If he wishes so much to die, he should do it himself. But I rather doubt he has the courage any more than he has the honesty and integrity to die unnoticed and unproclaimed. LM
This former governor has not leprechaun eyes, but rather those of the banshee.
A straight line from the Garden—“ye shall be gods knowing good and evil.” Since some doctors still hold to the ehics of life and not death, he needs to get the state to form a liscense board for practitioners of death who are not physicians. They could be called Executioners.
My father died of Parkinson’s, or rather, as people do, of complications. It’s not a pretty disease, and it entails a certain amount of depression, both physically caused by the disease and as a reaction to one’s deteriorating condition. What this guy wants is to be able to duck out when the going gets tough rather than confronting it with dignity and leaving a memory of dignified determination for his grandchildren. And he wants somebody else to do it. A law that allows depressed people to make others complicit in their deaths is immoral.