I suspect Jack Kevorkian might’ve been a more effective advocate for physician-assisted suicide had he not himself kind of looked and sounded like Death.
He had a timeless cragginess, as if he’d never been young. Had he chosen to wear a hooded black robe and carry a scythe, he could’ve taken home best costume at any Halloween party. When I heard last week that he’d died at 83, it seemed impossible he'd only been my dad's age.
When you saw and heard Kevorkian in interviews, even if you agreed with his message—as I did—you had to concede that, like the caricature of the Grim Reaper with his bony finger always pointed toward the grave, Kevorkian typically came across as humorless and grim and terribly one-note. It’s one thing to be known as “Dr Death,” the earnest crusader for humane euthanasia, but quite another to suggest by your appearance and manner that you’re on some frenzied recruiting tour for Big Sleep University.
The truth is, there always was something a little unnerving about Jack Kevorkian. Although he billed himself as an advocate for the terminally ill—people who suffered horribly from conditions such as MS, malignant brain tumors and Lou Gehrig’s disease and needed his help to end their misery—investigative reporters from the Detroit Free Press in Kevorkian’s home state of Michigan found that more the half of the 100-plus people who’d committed suicide with Kevorkian’s assistance hadn’t actually been considered terminally ill, and that many of those individuals might have benefited from medical and mental-health options that Kevorkian had been loath to explore in his zeal to render more permanent assistance.
Kevorkian disputed those findings, of course. And at any rate, he lived by (and went to jail for) the principle that the customer’s always right—at least when the customer is suffering from illness and sees death as a blessing. Still, fairly or not, there always was the suspicion that Kevorkian whistled while he worked. And that struck people as more than a little bit creepy.
Maybe that’s why, for all his notoriety, he never came close to provoking the groundswell of fury needed to further his goals. He sought to make it legal for a doctor (which he no longer was after Michigan revoked his medical license in 1991) to actively help a patient commit suicide. But that remains to this day illegal in every US state, and in only three—Oregon, Washington and Montana—is any form of physician-assisted suicide permitted. In Michigan, in fact, Kevorkian’s efforts succeeded only in getting the legal haziness he’d exploited at first hardened into an explicit ban on such assistance.
Whatever else he might have been, Jack Kevorkian, it must be said, was a manifestly strange dude. Never mind Gomez and Morticia—he seemed the real-life embodiment of Addams Family values. Death, in a real sense, was Kevorkian’s life. He never married, and devoted his lifelong bachelorhood to all manner of death-related pursuits. He invented suicide devices he fancifully dubbed the Thanatron (Thanatos being the Greek god of non-violent death) and the Mercitron. A jazz musician and composer, he dryly named his CD A Very Still Life and his band (for which he played flute and organ) the Morpheus Quintet. Kevorkian was a painter who favored oil when he wasn’t using his own blood, which he sometimes did. One of his images, I read this past week, was of a child eating the flesh off a decomposing corpse.
After Kevorkian died, I remembered a segment Michael Moore had done with him for his 1990s Fox show TV Nation. I recalled that the gag involved Kevorkian playing against type, and that in one scene the gaunt, disaffected ex-doctor and the portly, dyspeptic director were shown giddily flying kites on a bright, sunshiny day. I found the clip on YouTube the other day, and it’s hilarious. Clocking in at about six minutes and called “A Day with Dr Death,” it purports to show what Kevorkian does on his “day off”—you know, when he’s not administering lethal drugs to people. Kevorkian and Moore were filmed not just flying kites, but also swinging on swings, tooling around town in a vintage convertible, enjoying a picnic, and discussing such inanities as the hokey pokey and the Michigan state bird and tree. At one point Moore confides that his parents had asked him not to tell Kevorkian their ages, lest that should prompt him to pay them a visit. Kevorkian laughs good-naturedly at his tubby pal’s ribbing.
Maybe if TV Nation had been more of a hit, and the American public and our lawmakers had noted Kevorkian’s ability to poke fun at his own image, I sat there thinking for a brief second, his assisted-suicide campaign might have yielded better results. But then I dwelled on another image that had been played for laughs on TV Nation: Moore posing with an apple in his mouth for a painting to which Kevorkian was applying the finishing brushstrokes. It depicted a man holding in his arms his own bloody, severed head. Which had an apple in its mouth. Funny, yes—unless you know such a painting was right up the artist’s real-life alley.
Anyway, for all his morbid eccentricities—and for, OK, maybe having been a tad overzealous at times with the old Thanatron—I do think Jack Kevorkian’s stance on physician-assisted suicide was the correct one, and I’m sure all the people he helped exit this world felt content that his was the last face they saw. All in all, I admired the man, and I hope a combination of renewed advocacy and continuing medical advances one day will bring his vision of physician-assisted suicide to fruition. It may be, however, that the next public face of the issue will need to look a bit younger, kinder and less personally invested.
I read on Biography.com the other day that Kevorkian, the son of Armenian immigrants, rejected at an early age the existence of God because much of his extended family had been slaughtered by the Turks. Still, I like to think that if there is an afterlife, Jack Kevorkian made it to the good place, and that he and Charles Addams are sharing afternoon tea together. Sipping from toxically smoking cups, with Lurch doing the pouring.
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