Friendship, Unplugged

Recently a friend of mine asked me if I’d agree to pull the plug on her. I responded that I’d consider it an honor. It got me to thinking about the stage I’ve reached in my life.

My friend isn’t dying, at least any more than are any of us from the day we’re born. There’s no medically imposed timeline on her death, is what I mean to say. It’s a legal matter. What she asked of me, essentially, was to give her “do not resuscitate” assurance should she find herself on death’s door with no hope of a meaningful quality of life. Anticipating my “Why me?” questions, she said that in her state (state of the union, not state of mind) the individual assigned this power cannot be a relative. And frankly, she added, she could not trust blood relatives to honor her wishes in this regard. As to why me and not another friend, she said she knew she could trust me not to say to her face now that I’d allow her to die, yet later tell doctors to continue life support, swayed by my own self-doubts and/or pressure from said relatives.

That was why I told her I was honored. It’s a humbling thing to know that someone trusts you with his or her life, or more precisely its end. Actually, her request had arrived via e-mail, which is less weird than it sounds if you consider that I hate the phone and generally instruct friends to write to me instead if at all possible. (A face-to-face conversation wasn’t immediately possible in this case for logistic reasons.) So I actually e-mailed her my unequivocal acceptance. I’d opened the reply with the enthusiastic affirmative that I’d “be happy” to pull the plug on her, knowing she’d appreciate the dark humor.

Speaking of that, it occurs to me that when you’re a teenager, you get asked to baby-sit the neighbor kids. When you’re in your 20s or 30s, you may get asked to be a godparent. When you’re in your 40s, you might be approached to adopt the children of a couple you know, should they both die in a car crash. Well, I’m 52—firmly entrenched, I now recognize, in a decade during which it isn’t so much about the lives of children, but more about the pending (if not yet imminent) deaths of peers.

In fact, Lynn, who’ll be 50 in November, recently fielded and accepted the same “please kill me” request from a friend of hers who’s roughly in our age group. It’s a funny thing. I look at it not so much that people see us as executioner types or even necessarily coolly dispassionate, but more as being trustworthy. And maybe, too, as being reliably secular. I don’t know that in either case our friends consciously tapped us because we haven’t any religious concepts or hang-ups about what truly constitutes “life,” or doubts as to whether humans should have the power to end what God has granted. But perhaps on some level it made us better candidates for the job, in their minds.

I mean, anybody who’s known me long enough to have heard my rants has heard me praise the state of Oregon and The Netherlands for their stances on assisted suicide, and remembers my fury a few years back over the protracted, heartbreaking Terri Schiavo ordeal in Florida. Not that there aren’t religious people who share my views, but secularists like Lynn and me are even less likely, probably, to be swayed by the certitude of people whose emotions are guided less by the wishes of the afflicted than by hope for the divine.

I won’t pretend I’m crazy about being in my 50s. But age can offer certain bonuses—comfort in one’s own skin, financial security, increased down time, etc. It also can confer special privileges. Such as, in my case, being handed a key to life and death I may never use, but to which I’ve nevertheless been entrusted.