CAR CRASH

I had been thinking that I should trot across the alley to see how Wayne, Rose’s widower, and Eli, his “guest,” were getting along. I did NOT want to babysit them or even make a daily trek to get Wayne’s britches on as I did when Rose was dying of cancer. (He had lost an arm in a tree-trimming accident some years ago.) But I wished them well.

Last night the mayor called to tell me that Wayne and Eli were in a head-on collision over by Dupuyer and both were dead, along with the driver of the farm truck they hit. Wayne had hired a house cleaner who is taking care of the little dog, Angel, and watching out for the trailer, but I did go over and walk around with the flashlight to see if everything was closed. A boy had taken refuge with them but I don’t know where he went. Wayne also has an ancient mother in a nursing home in Conrad. Luckily, her mind is skippy enough that she won’t remember anything she’s told. The burden will fall on the oldest son.

Wayne and Rose were snowbirds when I came to Valier in 1999. They drove an RV down to Yuma every summer and Rose dearly loved the desert, but it’s far too hot to stay there in summer and they loved Montana as well. Their children and grandchildren are up here. The couple started out in the midwest running a dairy, which is one of the toughest rural jobs because the work is repetitious and constant -- no sneaking off for a little holiday. They came to Montana and floated a little while before buying the old Klick dude ranch out of Augusta.

Their specialty was running little expeditions for disabled children and they were good at it, but it got to be too much. For one thing, Rose became so deeply attached to the needy kids that it was emotionally bruising. After they sold the ranch, they were near Great Falls where Wayne worked for the city parks before a tree limb struck his arm off. A limb for a limb. It was touch and go and the RV was parked on the hospital parking lot so Rosie could stay near by. After that he was heavily medicated and wore a morphine pump. But he was most definitely alive and kept their yard immaculate.

Rose and I easily predicted that after she was gone, Eli the floater would move into the trailer with Wayne. I think they got along pretty well for a while. There was one episode when Eli was there alone. He’s a boy-magnet, partly because he always had a steady supply of beer and pot, and they all got into a big shouting match about something. I was attracted by the noise and called the deputy sheriff to back me up. That was August and all the guys were in their boxer shorts except the deputy, who wore his famous broad-brimmed black hat. We stood around and discussed life for a half-hour. It’s been quiet ever since.

People, esp. young people, talk about how they’d like to die. It’s one of the questions on the famous “Proust Questionnaire” on the last page of “Vanity Fair” magazine where the celebrity answers are usually witty. They say, “In my sleep,” or “painlessly.” Few ever talk about quality of life in one’s last years. At the heart of some of the insurance quandaries the US is struggling with is this avoided question: how much misery and limitation can you stand before you call it quits? And how can you ask to die if your mind has already preceded your body into the darkness?

Jessamyn West’s sister died of cancer and made the rule for herself that if she had less than an hour a day of being awake and relatively peaceful, she would commit suicide. She asked Jessamyn to help her. Her doctor provided the pills. She kept her word. Jessamyn wrote two books about it, one as fiction when it appeared she might be arrested for assisting and then another one as nonfiction when she was in the clear. It was not easy.

There are many problems. One of them is imposing one’s death (esp. if the method is messy) on someone else. Another is being able to set a limit as West’s sister did: why an hour? Is 59 minutes unbearable when 60 was? The method needs to be surefire and not leave one damaged in a nursing home or suffering for hours before discovery.

Those who have prevented suicides and reflected on it suggest that half of those saved are grateful and go on to recovery and happy lives. They might have been desperately signaling for help, esp. the young ones. But some old or severely disabled people may have been picking up messages encouraging them to die, maybe messages from people who don’t REALLY want them to die -- just to get a little relief from having to deal with them. Some people have trouble grasping just how final dead really is.

The Right to Die law begun in Oregon (my minister, Alan Deale, counseled the woman who went first) is now spreading everywhere. Ironically, the sharpest issue is not life but money. It costs too much for terminally ill patients to live on and on in the zombie way we can maintain them with modern machinery and meds, draining away all their assets to keep them only technically alive. But families don’t want to say, “That’s it. Pull the plug.” And the industry that supports those marginally existing humans makes lots of money. There is always the ghost suggestion of murder, haunting us with the idea of “death panels” because government and insurance entities cap the amount of money they’ll pay. Like the problem of Jessamyn West’s sister’s one-hour-a-day criteria, there is no bright line between paying out a hundred thousand dollars and refusing to pay a bill for $100,001.

Many issues are impossible to resolve in terms of avoiding negatives, but will yield to a positive thrust. How do we enrich and increase Life? Even Wayne and Eli, two old characters with disabilities, died in the midst of schemes and projects. It was a sudden event. They didn’t linger on. I grieve for that other driver of the farm truck. And where is that runaway boy? He has a life ahead of him.