My, what a wonderful weekend it’s been. Especially for the Grim Reaper, who’s been in the news a lot.
For instance, on Sunday, before I even opened the pages of the Washington Post Magazine, I couldn’t help noticing the words Death’s Door: Committing suicide couldn’t be easier — or more complicated printed right across the cover.
Well, thank you for the reminder.
But, before I got to reading that fun article, I read this column, as is my habit.
Now, most people would read that and think, Contra dancing? How nice! What a great way to spend your time. 
Cool!
Unfortunately, the coolness of the article was overshadowed for me, by the memory of my dead friend.
If you click that link and read my column, you’ll see he used to contra dance, too. He invited me, but I never went. A missed opportunity that I now regret.
So … dance while you can, okay? 
But back to the subject at hand. Death and assisted suicide and this article about a Baltimore doctor who helps those who’d like to kick the bucket, but can’t pull it off alone.
That face. Those eyes. They say a lot right there.
I read the article:
Dust speckles shelves up on the third story. Wood floors creak. Walls and cabinets in the cramped office, tucked into a red-brick Baltimore rowhouse, channel a generation’s worth of sloganeering.
“We shall overcome Reagan”
“Nuclear Free Zone”
“Don’t buy war toys”
Lawrence Egbert comes here almost every weekday, taking calls on an old white push-button phone with a handset darkened by years of smudged newsprint and perspiration. He climbs the stairs, slower now since a bicycle accident two years ago cracked his pelvis, but steady and resolute.
Amid the kaleidoscope of distractions, a lumpy white garbage bag slumps on the floor against a metal bookshelf. Egbert doesn’t object when I ask to peek inside.
I pull the yellow drawstrings, and the bag sags open. A muddle of plastic lies before me. Long plastic tubes twine around each other, refusing to let go, like stubborn tendrils of ivy clasping tree branches.
Egbert, a slightly built, genial and energetic retired anesthesiologist with a snowy goatee, turns to his computer, his back to me, content to answer an e-mail while I sort through the pile. Once I finish untangling, I hold in my hands a curious plastic sack, about 21 inches long and 18 inches wide. A bunched white elastic strip, reminiscent of a garter, circles the mouth at the open end. A thick plastic tube runs into the sack, stretching 37 inches before branching into a T-shape with 12-inch arms extending from each side of the joint.
Egbert calls it an “exit hood.” It’s a contraption that can end a life in minutes. The 84-year-old doctor, who formerly served as a campus Unitarian Universalist minister and has taught as an assistant visiting professor at Johns Hopkins University, offers to explain how it works. The tube connects to two helium tanks, he says. He lifts the hood over his head and lowers the open end, letting go as the garter clamps to his forehead. Then, he says, you release the valves on the tanks, streaming helium into the hood.
“You fill it up until it feels like a New York chef’s hat,” he says, stretching the hood to demonstrate.
Then, he says, you pull the hood down. And he does just that, easing it past his eyes, his nose, his chin, and cinching it even tighter at his neck with a sweatband. His face goes hazy behind the plastic, a blurry image of a man whose life and work are prone to distortions and intrigue. His breath fogs the plastic, but he holds the hood there for a moment, saying something that I can’t quite make out.
Might he need saving?
Another breath. More fog. Even though there’s no helium coursing into the hood, I’m anxious. Should I pull it away?
Another breath, and, finally, he lifts the hood. He inhales deeply and smiles.
“That’s how it’s done,” he says matter-of-factly.
In those final seconds before his patients lose consciousness and die, the words they utter sound like Donald Duck, he says, imitating the high-pitched, nasally squeak familiar to any child who has sucked a gulp from a helium balloon.
So, this is how a human being can leave this Earth?
Okay. You get the idea. Here’s the thing. I’d be lying if I didn’t say I haven’t considered taking the easy way out. Or is it? The will to survive is mighty strong.
If you read the whole article, you’ll see that Egbert has been sued, indicted, compared with the Nazis and so on. Yet, he didn’t stick a gun to anyone’s head or issue orders from on high like Hitler. In fact, I’d say it’s pretty obvious there many differences between Egbert and Hitler.
In fact, my dead friend with cancer might have even appreciated Egbert’s help for all I know. He was suffering something fiercely toward the end.
What would Christopher Hitchens say?
One thing I can’t help but notice is Egbert’s difficulty climbing the stairs. This gets explained at the end of the article, like a footnote, but to me it’s an essential part of the man.
On a wet September night in 2009, the tires of Egbert’s bicycle skidded through a patch of soggy leaves, and he was thrown to the roadway.
He had been on his way to deliver a sermon at Johns Hopkins. (Since his arrest, the university has not renewed his position as Unitarian campus minister, and he has not been asked back to review medical school applications, he says.)
The accident cracked the front and back of his pelvis. Surgery wouldn’t help, the doctors told him. He would have to learn to walk with a broken pelvis. Every time he shifted his weight or tried to take a step, pain shot through his body.
In his agony, Egbert, who has witnessed the endings of so many lives, considered ending his own. “There are some people who like to suffer — that there is a religious gain in suffering,” he says. “I don’t believe that.”
Amen, brother! Ha ha ha …
But he began to mend, and thoughts of living pushed aside thoughts of dying.
If only I could … mend, that is … but I have to keep living even so.
When the end does come, Egbert figures, he’ll “go into the ground and rot.” He doesn’t believe in an after-life, though many of his patients have found comfort in the belief that they will be going to a better place. “I don’t think it’s worthwhile to worry about what happens to you when you’re dead.”
Damn straight!
He has been explicit about his wishes for his own death. He doesn’t want to die in a nursing home or on a ventilator. When he’s gone, he wants his body taken to Johns Hopkins University. He’d like it to be given to the researchers in the Parkinson’s laboratory.
I don’t want to waste away before I die, either. And if my body can be useful to researchers, I’d like someone to figure out how to cure … guess what? … dystonia. Big surprise!
They can place his body next to the bodies of people who died from Parkinson’s disease, he reasons. He wants his body to be the scientific control. He hopes his body can be an example of a human being who died “a natural death,” a death without extended suffering. A death without a hood.
Yeah, let’s hope for the best for us all.
(video via Nik Nak’s Old Peculiar)
BTW, rumors of Joe Paterno’s death were wrong. Then, they weren’t. Then, the emailed Sunday NY Times blew the story completely.
And how many death threats has this guy gotten?
PS: RIP Etta James. My, what a terrible pun my headline turned out to be — but not nearly as tasteless as this headline.
UPDATE: This is really late-breaking news, but it seemed so appropriate that I couldn’t resist sneaking it in. So here it is. I guess we all have to go sometime, right?
