MARCH 10, 1995 GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE 11
SPEAK OUT
How a dying man's last wish can be a crime of law and culture
by Mubarak S. Dahir
Rick was supposed to kill himself. As a reporter, I was supposed to record it. That was our deal.
A mutual friend who knew Rick's intentions and my interest in the story brought us together. After several carefully arranged telephone calls-which I later found out were designed to test if I might try to talk Rick out of his plan-Rick agreed to meet me.
That's what brought us together for the first time last year at Rick's favorite corner diner, a place where you were guaranteed a cheap cheeseburger and a sassy waitress. Rick always said the waitresses were the better deal, and the bigger draw.
Since I'd never met him before, Rick told me to look for his signature black-and-white railroad cap. I thought trains might be some kind of hobby, but I later learned he wore the cap to cover a head balded from the side effects of medication.
But even without the cap, Rick was easy to spot in the restaurant. He was the one who looked like he had AIDS.
Wasting syndrome had reduced him to a skeleton-like figure, the bones visibly protruding under his skin. He was sitting on a round cushion he called "the donut" because it resembled a large, air-filled version of the pastry. While he was sitting, the donut made it possible for him to carry what was left of his weight without bones pushing through his buttocks.
The first day we met at the diner, Rick must have sat nearly two hours before the donut failed to stop his pain. As the months passed, though, Rick was lucky if the donut gave him as much as ten minutes of relief.
And relief was exactly what Rick was looking for, what he had planned for himself when the disease started taking too high atoll on his body.
Rick knew since 1986 he was HIV-positive. He also knew the potential agony that comes at the end of a long-term illness: he had buried his lover, and watched his father die a slow, rueful death from cancer.
Rick was determined he was not going to end up the same way. He vowed that when the time came where he no longer had quality of life, he would end it. Through a friend who was a nurse, he planned to take the right mix of drugs that would quietly, painlessly end his life when the time came.
For the first several months after I met Rick, he was still able to enjoy a little of his life. Though it took him half an hour to walk to his favorite bar just three blocks from his apartment, he managed to make the trek a couple of times a month. Since he could no longer sit for any period of time, friends would drop by his apartment bringing him one of those famous diner cheeseburgers. Despite his complaint that the burgers didn't taste the same without the saucy waitresses, the renewed sparkle in his sunken blue eyes told you he was happy to get the treat.
Other times we'd go shopping for butter creams and cheesecake to try to help him gain weight. "I must be the only one who buys these who doesn't worry about the fat killing me!" he'd say.
Within three months after our first meeting, however, it was clear to us both that there was little remaining in Rick's day to call a life. He left the apartment only twice a month, both times to go to the doctor. He regularly slept 18 hours a day; the other six he'd lay in and out of consciousness in front of the TV. He had lost so much weight, he was in constant pain from his bones rubbing against the bed. Even going to the bathroom became a major ordeal.
"What quality of life do I have?" he asked me the day he decided to call his friend and ask for the drugs. “I'm just waiting to die."
But the nurse must have gotten cold feet, because she wouldn't return Rick's calls. So Rick began talking of other ways to kill himself, like an overdose of street drugs. He even once pleaded, "Play Dr. Kevorkian for me," begging me to smother him with a pillow, promising he wouldn't resist.
Other times he contemplated more drastic measures, like a car accident or a bullet, ideas he soon rejected. "Nothing messy," he told me without a trace of irony.
Well, Rick is dead now, and though he didn't take his own life, things feel very messy to me indeed.
I still wonder why he had to endure those last few months alone in a nursing home, when he lost his dignity, his autonomy and the right to decide his own fate. The last time
I saw him, he kept repeating, "I just can't take this anymore. I just can't take this anymore." And no one should have to.
But we live in a society where Rick's last wish was a crime of both law and culture.
The real crime, though, is that Rick died alone in a nursing home, away from his circle of friends and without anyone by his side to hive him the proper farewell he could have arranged if he was allowed to do things as he'd planned.
Instead, he slipped silently into a coma and passed away with his eyes wide open, the way he had always faced death. ✓
Mubarak Dahir is a regular columnist with the Philadelphia Daily News, and is the Philadelphia reporter for Time magazine.
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