JANUARY 26, 1998 VOL. 151 NO. 4
	Live and Let Die Should a rational person who chooses death be forced to "soldier on"? By ROD USHER amon Sampedro was a live head on a dead body. That's a brutal description of full paralysis, but it's the way he saw it. Ramon's brain worked better than most people's and his wit was as quick as his smile was warm, but from the neck down he was limp flesh, capable of no more than involuntary spasms. He lived this mind-body limbo for 29 of his 55 years. As a young man full of vigor he had jumped into the sea from rocks near his home, a fishing village in the northern Spanish region of Galicia. Misjudging the water's depth, he struck his head on the bottom. Tucked up at home in a high bed, his window framing green countryside and in the distance the Atlantic coast that crippled him, Ramon Sampedro might never have been heard of again after the accident three decades ago. But when he died last week few of his countrymen did not know of him, and his face had been seen on television in Holland, the United States, as far away as Australia. Ramon's farming family cared for him, a labor of love encompassing the minutiae of total immobility. When I met him three years ago his sister-in-law was finishing feeding him lunch. Then she lit his cigarette, managed its ash, stubbed it out, put on his glasses.... Ramon said after she left the room that his family members were "physical and psychological slaves" to his quadriplegia, a view they did not share. With time, Ramon's mind had become as fit as his body was flaccid. He read Swift, Wilde and Flaubert, and he talked. You could ring him direct via a mouth-operated device he designed to answer the phone. But many years ago Ramon decided he could no longer bear the life of a tuned mind atop an insensate body, dependent from teeth to toenails and each pore and sphincter in between. So he opted for death. He didn't proselytize; he agreed that others similarly afflicted might lead fulfilled lives, but he rejected the claims of church and state that he must not choose to die. His problem was that while his mind was made up, he was physically incapable of killing himself. For five years he sought legal approval to have someone help him, preferably his local doctor, Carlos Peon Fernandez, a sympathetic man who regards life as "private property" but who obeys the law. Ramon tried Spain's lower courts, its higher courts, even the European Commission on Human Rights in Strasbourg. He met walls of procedure and prohibition, or legal vacuum. He talked of somehow getting to Holland, where assisting voluntary death is not legal, but doctors are not prosecuted. In countries less practical than Holland it is common for people suffering in their last stages to be quietly overdosed with painkillers, the act camouflaged by the nicety that what counts in many penal codes is whether the lethal amount was given to alleviate pain or to kill. Intent is a slippery fish. Faint hopes of a statutory right to die were raised in 1966 when Australia's remote Northern Territory became the first place to legalize voluntary euthanasia. This enabled four terminally ill people to end their lives using a computer linked to a lethal injection. The law was overturned last year by Australia's Federal Parliament. Ramon would not have been covered by similar legislation. He was not terminally ill. He was terminally sad. He might have fasted to death but did not see why he should have to, and he knew the trauma it would mean for his religious, pro-life family. It was with them in mind, it seems, that two months ago he had friends take him from the farm at Porto do Son to an apartment about 30 km away. They also took over his daily care. Early last week one of the friends reported to police that Ramon was dead in his bed. Given that he was rarely ill, had somebody at last helped him to do what he most wanted from life--to leave it? The answer came on Wednesday; the autopsy revealed traces of cyanide in his blood and stomach. It remains to be seen if anybody will be charged with the offense of assisting suicide. His family doesn't want anyone prosecuted. There was a big crowd at the home-town funeral. A lot of people are going to miss Ramon. But for him life had more sting than death. As he put it in a poem he wrote years ago, "The dream has become a nightmare." Society required that he keep living that nightmare, that he "soldier on" for perhaps another 40 years--his father Joaquin is 92. Such is our collective fear of "surrendering" to death. We negate death to the point that a gentle man is forced to struggle without the use of arms or legs to devise a way to obtain and ingest cyanide. At night. Away from home. Illegally. Ramon Sampedro was denied what Camus called "a happy death." But he did pry open a taboo, quietly arguing that quality rather than quantity was his measure of a happy life. Right now I like to think RIP has a small new meaning. Ramon in Peace.
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