Living Will

My father collapsed in cardiac arrest in his doctor's office in October of 2000.  They managed to get the heart pumping again but it was too late-- the lack of oxygen in those crucial minutes was too much.  He never woke up.  He didn't have a living will.  We all knew he didn't want to live like that, but since he had nothing in writing, one of us had to apply for guardianship.  The guardianship process took two months.  It was a weird idea to become the guardian of my paternal guardian.  The lawyer appeared at the foot of the bed and spoke outloud to the man in a coma: "Hey Dennis.  Your daughter wants guardianship.  Is that okay, Dennis?  Dennis?"  It was a requirement of the law, but it didn't seem right.

Fortunately my brother and I were both on the same page.  Fortunately my father had no other family, besides his father who was under legal guardianship himself.  Fortunately there were no confusing signs of conciousness.  Fortunately he didn't belong to a church group or some other right-to-life organization which might have put pressure on us.

Fortunately, he took care of the problem for us and died peacefully in his sleep on December 15.  The only decision I had to make, as his new guardian, was whether to put him back on dialysis to prolong the end a little longer.  It wouldn't have made a difference either way, but I said no, and let him go.

After all that, I don't have a living will either.  It's not because I'm lazy but because the circumstances in which I may not want to live are so broad that I can't possibly anticipate them.  I know this for sure, though.  If I'm ever incapacitated to the state in which my father or Terry Schiavo found themselves in, I hereby refuse the right of the State or US Federal government to interfere with my family's personal freedom to do what they must with the burden I present to them.  I don't know what it's like to be Terry or my father.  But I do know what it's like to carry the weight of the brain dead with you, every hour, day after day.  And I wouldn't wish that on anybody.