I, _________________________ (fill in the blank),
being of sound mind and body, do not wish to be kept
alive indefinitely by artificial means.
Under no circumstances should my fate be put in the
hands of peckerwood politicians who couldn't pass
ninth-grade biology if their lives depended on it. If
a reasonable amount of time passes and I fail to ask
for a cup of fresh-ground French roast and access to
my email, it should be presumed that I won't ever get
better.
When such a determination is reached, I hereby
instruct my spouse, children, and/or attending
physicians to pull the plug, reel in the tubes, and
call it a day. If they won't do it, go out on the
street and get some random passerby or wino.
Under no circumstances shall the members of the
Legislature enact a special law to keep me on
life-support machinery. I don't care how many
fundamentalist votes they're trying to scrounge for
their run for the presidency; they should play
politics with someone else's life and leave me alone
to die in peace. It is my wish that these boneheads
mind their own damn business, and pay attention
instead to the health, education, and future of the
millions of Americans who aren't in a permanent coma.
It just goes to show you how sick you have to be in
this country to get Congress to pay attention to your
health care.
I couldn't care less if a hundred thousand religious
zealots send e-mails to legislators in which they
pretend to care about me or demonstrate outside my
hospital with their bleeding Jesuses and sandwiches
with Mary's face on them. I don't know these people,
and I certainly haven't authorized them to preach and
crusade on my behalf. And the Pope should mind his own
friggin' business, too.
And if any of my family goes against my wishes and
tries to turn my case into a political cause, I hereby
promise to come back from the grave and make his or
her existence a living hell.
______________________________________
Signature
______________________________________
Witness
______________________________________
Witness
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one via mitja:
Living will is the best revenge
By ROBERT FRIEDMAN, Perspective Editor
Published March 27, 2005
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
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
abitter 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
deepdevotion 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 wa rrant 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.
Robert Friedman is editor of Perspective. He can be reached at
friedman@sptimes.com
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