Living will is the best revenge
By ROBERT FRIEDMAN
Published March 27, 2005
http://www.sptimes.com/2005/03/27/Columns/Living_will_is_the_be.shtm
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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.