Death Comes for Doctor Death

Retired pathologist Jack Kevorkian, dubbed “Doctor Death” for his advocacy of assisted suicide for those suffering from extreme pain or terminal conditions, crossed over to the Other Side last week.

Death came for the doctor on the early morning of June 3 at a hospital in Royal Oak, Mich., where Kevorkian had been hospitalized for weeks with pneumonia and kidney problems.

Perhaps ironically, Kevorkian, who was 83, did not hook himself up to the “suicide machine” he invented and used to help an estimated 130 people pass away in the 1990s.

Kevorkian’s attorney, Mayer Morganroth, told a newspaper reporter that the assisted-suicide advocate died peacefully.

“It was peaceful,” Morganroth was quoted as saying. “He didn’t feel a thing,” adding that attending nurses played classical music by Kevorkian’s favorite composer – Johann Sebastian Bach – just before he died.

Kevorkian, a slight, usually smiling man, was undaunted in his pursuit of a change in the way society views assisted suicide. He constantly challenged the state to stop him or make his actions legal – never backing down from threats of imprisonment.

His first four trials resulted in acquittal or mistrial. He even went on CBS’s “60 Minutes” in 1998 with a video of him assisting a man with Lou Gehrig’s Disease to die.

It was one step too far, and Kevorkian was finally convicted of second-degree murder in 1999. He was sentenced to 10 to 25 years in prison but was released in 2007 after serving eight years.

For Doctor Death, you either loved him or hated him – usually depending on your religious orientation or whether you knew someone suffering unrelenting, incurable pain.

The argument usually came down to whether a person has the right to decide to stop living. That’s a pretty BIG argument to have, but Kevorkian was insistent on society airing it and finally coming to terms with it.

Certainly in the U.S., people are very nervous about talking about such things, generally preferring to change the subject or wish it would just go away.

In retrospect, it’s hard to say what kind of legacy Kevorkian left. Some were moved by his cause, and Oregon made physician-assisted suicide legal in 1997 and Washington followed in 2009. That same year the Montana Supreme Court effectively legalized the practice.

“Somebody has to do something for suffering humanity,” Kevorkian is quoted as once saying. “I put myself in my patients’ place. This is something I would want.”

For Kevorkian, it all came down to a patient’s right to hold onto their dignity in their final time on Earth and not to have to end their life screaming in pain or drugged into a vegetative stupor.

Will Kevorkian’s work go on? Certainly no one has yet picked up the torch to carry it forward. Kevorkian was without a doubt one of those boat rockers willing to take an unpopular stand and keep pushing it at all costs.

Kevorkian brought his cause – and that of his believers – out of the shadows and rubbed it in society’s face.

He won’t be soon forgotten.

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