Uncle Eddie needed an 800 number. His sideline in the suicide
cleanup trade was going gangbusters. He needed a separate phone line, a logo, a slogan, and
magnetic business cards. I was touched that he would come to me, his much older brother, for
advice. "Whadaya think about 1 - 800 - SUICIDE? Too morbid? Too direct? Or 1 - 800 - Triple S?
You know. For Specialised Sanitation Services?"
In his heart of hearts he had
hopes that Triple S - for Specialised Sanitation Services - would become as widely recognised
as Triple A had for Automobile Association of America, or WWW had for the Worldwide Web, or
Triple X had for a style of cinema that Uncle Eddie said excited his passion for First
Amendment Rights. Though perhaps his services were a little too specialised - known only to
local and state law enforcement agencies and county medical examiners and funeral homes and
needed only by the families and landlords of the messy dead.
Indoor suicides, homicides,
household accidents, or natural deaths undetected in a timely fashion - these were the
exceptional cases that often required the Specialised Sanitation Services that Uncle Eddie
and his staff at Triple S - his wife, his golfing buddy, and his golfing buddy's wife - stood
ever ready to provide for reasonable fees, most often covered by homeowners' insurance.
"Maybe you should just play whatever numbers come up Ed." I counselled. "Maybe ask for
something that ends in zeros."
At this Uncle Eddie's visage changed - adopting the
distant and bedazzled gape of the ancient Mayan perplexed by the delicate mysteries of
nothingness.
Years ago I would do it for free. I'd only been in town a matter of months
when the chief of police called the funeral home in the middle of the night to ask if we had
anyone on the staff who took care of "the messes...you know, the really bad ones."
"We've had a bad one over here on Highland Road. I just can't let his family back in the
house until something's done with it. Really bad."
It seemed the late mortgagee of the
split level home on Highland Road had grown weary of his wife's ongoing affair with the
chiropractor for whom she worked. The chief had been able to piece it together from physical
evidence and the widow's understandably agitated testimony. The cuckholded householder had
sat up drinking after his wife had gone to bed, announcing her intention to put spongy
rollers in her hair. This had become an intimate code that meant she did not want to have
sex with him but wanted to look good for the boss tomorrow. He'd finished the bottle of
Dunphy's Irish and raided her stash of Valium, then gone to the drawer where the Black and
Decker electric carving knife was kept between Easters and Thanksgivings and Christmases.
He'd plugged it into the wall socket on his side of the bed, locked his jaw against any
utterance, and, laying down beside her, applied the humming knife to his throat, severing
his carotid arteries and making it half through his oesophagus before he released his hold
on the knife's trigger. It had not been his coming to bed, nor the buzz of the knife, nor
any sound he'd made that woke her. Rather, it was the warmth of his blood gushing from his
severed vessels halfway up the master bedroom wall and soaking her and her spongy rollers
and saturating the bed linens and mattress and box springs and puddling in the carpet
beneath the bed that woke her, wondering was it just a dream.
Determination
We
washed and scrubbed and wiped until daybreak. And after much suturing and the use of a
turtleneck sweater, predicted the possibility of an open casket, though nothing could be
done about the dead man's mouth, which was clenched in the way you see in the movies when
they give the wounded hero a bottle of hooch and a bit of leather to chew before they remove
the bullet or the leg that the bullet was shot into.
The poor client looked, as a cousin several times removed remarked, "determined."
This is the part I have always admired - the determination, the pure resolve, to do one's
self such massive and irreparable damage, which is the distinguishing element of all
successful suicides. It distinguishes the true killer from the occasionally suicidal. Who
among us in our right minds hasn't yearned several times in the course of life for the
comforts of absence and non - being? But there is a subtle and important difference between
those of us who'd rather not be alive tomorrow - incomplete homework, biopsy results,
romantic reversals, pregnancy tests - and those of us who want to be dead, tomorrow and the
day after and forever. The latter is the exception; the former, the rule.
To kill a
member of one's species - be it oneself or another - calls for a deadly silence, however
momentary, of all the voices raised to the contrary. As anyone who has swatted a wasp, or
caught a fish, or shot an animal, or sat with the dying of our own kind knows, life - at the
cellular level - rages against the dying of the light. Something in us argues, "Don't!"
Don't leave a mess. Call Triple S! is the slogan Uncle Eddie invented. He had it
printed in 22 point bold Mead gold letters on a dark green background along with his 800
number (1 - 800 - 668 - 4464) and made into kitchen magnet cards, and he mailed them out to police
and fire stations, funeral homes, and the county morgues here in southeastern Michigan.
Before he knew it the phone began to ring - once or twice a month at first, then once or
twice a week. There was the occasional murder that called for his attention, or the old
timers dead but undiscovered. But for the most part Triple S relied on the grisly and
violent homemade suicides that erred on the side of excess and overkill to cover the fixed
costs of the enterprise.
It was June 1990 when Uncle Eddie burst into my office waving a
newspaper that carried the story of Jack Kevorkian, one of our local head cases here in
Oakland County, who had just used his suicide machine for the first time a few miles north
of here.
"Who's this asshole Dr Death?" he hollered. "And why is he
trying to put me out of business?"
I told him it had nothing to do with Triple S. But my
younger brother, ever the visionary, said that it was a genuine threat. He went on to
explain that tidy, bloodless, medically supervised, and assisted suicides would make his
Specialised Sanitation Services redundant, his mop and bucket crews as obsolete as
typewriters or telegraphs. "The handwriting's on the wall," he sighed. "It's only a
matter of time."
I told him not to lose hope. Surely Kevorkian would go to jail or to
the asylum. Injecting poisons was against the law. Clearly suicide was more murderous than
medicinal. "Assisted suicide" like "holy war" is an oxymoronic romance that seeks to
make killing sound like kindness or courtesy or a good cause. Folks would soon go back to
the old trusted solo ways - pills, gas stoves, bridge abutments, firearms - that made up in
raw independence whatever they lacked in tidiness.
Of course, recent history has proven
me wrong. Nearing the end of 1996 Jack has assisted in nearly 50 "medicides" and is
picking up the pace, delivering the bodies to local hospitals himself, daring the local
prosecutor to take him back to court. He has become the poster boy for the Death with
Dignity, Right - to - Die, PAS [physician assisted suicide], VES [Voluntary Euthanasia Society]
crowds; the cartoon and caricature of a deeper, darker existential question about the
meaning of life and choice that promises to divide us as abortion - the other existential
question we have bungled lately - has and always will.
A more shameful, sad, and
perilous world
Truth told, I believe it is our nature to die, not our right. I believe we
have the ability to kill, to make things dead, even ourselves, but we haven't the right. And
when we exercise that ability in the name of God (as we have done in war), or of Justice (as
we have done with capital punishment), or of Choice (as we have done with abortion), we
should have the good sense to recognise it for what it isn't: neither enlightenment nor
civilisation nor progress nor mercy. Nor is it an inalienable right. It is, rather, a shame,
a sadness, a peril from which no congress's legislation, no churchman's dispensation, no
public opinion, or conventional wisdom can ever deliver us. For if we live in a world where
birth is suspect, the value of life is relative, and death is welcomed and well regarded, we
live in a world vastly more shameful, abundantly sadder, and ever more perilous than all the
primitive generations of our species before us who were sufficiently civilised to fill with
wonder at the birth of new life, dance with the living, and weep for the dead.
But the
advance of our biomedical prowess is coincidental with the loss of our appetite for the
ethical questions that ought to attend the implications of these new powers. We have blurred
the borders between being and ceasing to be by a technology that can tell us How It
Works but not What It Means. And we, godhelpus, are afraid to ask.
No member
of my generation - that demographic aneurysm called the Baby Boom - should miss the irony that
the first generation to plan its parenthood, to manage and manipulate its fertility, may
well be the first generation to have its deaths planned for them, its mortality managed and
manipulated by our own children, those who survived the gauntlet of our "choices."
Likewise, we should depend on them to make their choices the way we've made ours: by
convenience and expedience and five year plans, efficiency and function and high
performance, quality time and available resources. Less, we've always lied to them,
is more! Maybe we shouldn't have fooled Mother Nature.
But Uncle Eddie, as I
mentioned, is a visionary. And nowadays the suicides are tidy and well planned. The messes,
the really bad ones, are the questions we would rather no one posed. Unvexed by the
existentials, what Uncle Eddie wants, while Kevorkian purses his immortality, is what he
calls "a little something on the side" - an extra income not promised to the mortgage or
the grocer or the shoe store or the tax man.
"You've got to give 'em what it is they
want" is what he tells me, "the better mouse - trap, you know packaging!"
Thus
Specialised Sanitation Services has evolved, like a new version of Windows, into a new, more
user friendly Triple S. Suicide Support and Supply is Uncle Eddie's sideline now. Instead of
a rusting minivan and these jerry rigged contraptions Kevorkian uses - intravenous bottles
and carbon monoxide canisters - Uncle Eddie arrives in a new black sedan, dressed more or
less like a TV preacher, and carrying a briefcase in which he has release forms, credit card
vouchers, generic farewell notes, a pearl handled hair triggered 22 calibre Smith and
Wesson, and a specially designed trash can lid with bullet proof vesting Velcroed to the
interior. He calls it his "Sanitron" in homage to Kevorkian's bizarre wordsmithing. He
instructs the client on aiming the pistol just behind the right earlobe and squeezing the
trigger. There are practice shots. The client holds the Sanitron in his or her left hand,
like a baseball glove, to catch any debris. Most often the bullet is caught in the bullet
proof netting. Uncle Eddie has these made into commemorative pendants for the next of kin.
It is this attention to detail that has made Triple S the local leader in the assisted
suicide trade.
The handgun is, to no one's surprise, One Hundred Per Cent lethal. There's
a small entrance wound that doesn't interfere with plans for an open casket. The spinal cord
is severed. Death is immediate and merciful and remarkably tidy. Uncle Eddie's slogan,
Don't leave a mess. Call Triple S still makes perfect sense. The kitchen magnets turn
up everywhere in the county. He accepts all the major credit cards.
Uncle Eddie says it's
not the suicide - we've always had that - it's the assistance that we need to sell. It's
someone to stand up and shout down the voices. Those women in the back of the Volkswagen van
didn't need the help with the killing part. They had the physical resources to swallow
pills, pull a trigger, start a car, turn on the gas stove, call it a day. They had the
psychological resources to overcome the fear of dying, a fear like the fear of any unknown.
They had the spiritual resources to understand that God or Whatever Is Out There would, by
definition, understand them. What they lacked was the voice to shout down their own voices
that whispered to them the case for living - part nature, part nurture - the voice that says
that to take life, however painful and imperfect, does damage to the rest of life in all its
incarnations. The old pathologist, with his jerry - rigged contraption - his
Thanatron - and his ethically neutered lexicon made all those women his
patients and potassium chloride and carbon monoxide not poison but treatment
and what they were doing not suicide, but medicide proving once again that modern
axiom about the big lie being easier to sell than the small one.
And to those who argue
only doctors should do it, Uncle Eddie simply asks them Why? If unlicensed
pathologists, why not retired clergy, or victualers short on cash, or rehabilitated serial
killers, or veterans of foreign wars. We're not talking, as the overworked idiom holds,
brain surgery here. Most of the species knows how to kill.
Nor should this right to die
and right to assistance with one's death be limited to the terminally ill. Pain is the
problem, suffering. Do jilted lovers suffer less than cancer patients? Who's to say? Is
heartbreak more bearable than congestive heart failure? Is perfect memory less painful than
senility? And if the teen girl who gets pregnant at the prom is as entitled to an abortion
as the child raped by mannish violence; so too, the teen who doesn't get a prom date is as
entitled to her assisted suicide as is her grandparent with Alzheimer's.
Where life is
sacred we must suffer the life. Where choice is enshrined we must suffer the choices.
Uncle Eddie's talking clinics now - obitoria. Because a rusting Volkswagen and
Kevorkian's crazed personal style are the back alley and coat hanger of the suicide trade.
And he is getting tired of house calls. I confess it has occurred to me that a tastefully
unimposing annex to our current emporium here in Milford might be the obvious and proximate
preference of my townspeople. Two or three thousand non - threatening square feet, say, with
plenty of big pillows in earthtones and natural fabrics, new age music piped in, a staff of
appropriately frumpy helping professionals trained to assist with "end of life" (the
locally fashionable euphemism) decisions. And exclusively motivational wall
treatments - Love is Forever or Just Do It! imposed on a watercolour landscape
of the Dolomites - reminiscent in decor and concordance of nothing so much as one's
kindergarten. And maybe a two or three unit crematorium attached since, if the records in
Oakland County are any predictor, the bodies will be for the most part female (Is this
sexism, gender - norming or affirmative action?) and, for the most part, burnt. By a happy
coincidence, our current holdings here in Milford take up most of a block on the corner of
Liberty and First Streets making The First Liberty Clinic an aptly patriotic, almost
churchy corporate name. Or maybe just The Libertorium?
Someone will have to be in
charge of establishing federally mandated minimum standards for Meaningful Living, below
which, it might prudently follow, social security checks could be discontinued. Once life is
meaningless, it oughtn't to be a burden on the taxpayers. And just as our generation of
policy makers has found that abortion is more cost effective than paying welfare, our
children's generation, already in arrears with our national debt, will find medicide
a better bargain than Medicare. This will not require anyone to take their voluntary
leave of this life, but it may help to educate them as to their duties as a citizen. Surely
there will be no shortage of bishops and politicos willing to serve on such a panel.
Of
course, Uncle Eddie wants to call it Serenity Social Services, you know, Triple S. He
says folks could make a day of it. A light breakfast. A chat with one of his
"facilitators," prearrangement of the obsequies, a video farewell message for the
survivors. He says he'll offer several methods - guns, gas stoves, gallows - you know,
choices. He says he could keep the same slogan and logo - Don't leave a mess...etc.
He's got all these memo pads and coffee mugs, key chains, and kitchen magnets. Even the same
800 number would work, puzzling over the familiar digits of which Uncle Eddie has noticed it
always spelt NOTHING.
328 East Liberty,
Milford, MI 48381,
USA
Thomas Lynch,
funeral director,
writer
Email:
thoslynch@aol.com
