Transition–an end and a new beginning

Three miles north of purgatory — one step from the great beyond/I prayed to the cross and I kissed the girls and I crossed the Rubicon.                                                                                                                                                                                       –– Bob Dylan from “Crossing the Rubicon”

This blog post represents the end of three years of work for me.  In summer 2017, Gary Wederspahn proposed that we start a blog for Final Exit Network (FEN).  Gary is the FEN board member in charge of outreach, a broad portfolio that encompasses a speaker’s bureau, spreading word about FEN through media, and the FEN blog.  

Gary wrote, with my assistance, a proposal to create a blog that would focus on end-of-life and right-to-die issues.  We agreed on an edited blog that would require careful thought and at least minimal scholarship, as opposed to stream-of-consciousness writing.  We also wanted to hear from as many voices as possible.  While that may have been achieved from one perspective, I had hoped for many more contributors than we have had.  For good or ill, I have provided about 80% of the 140 posts written over three years, not counting the reprints from FEN’s Newsletter during vacation and holiday periods.  When I have done the writing, I have spent about twenty hours a week reading, researching, writing, and formatting the post for publication.

While I am not planning to “cross the Rubicon” to “the great beyond” any time soon, I am reminded that few of us know when that time will be upon us.  I have a few other tasks I want to work on between now and then.  I think I will consider my life to have kept having meaning if I still have a few projects on the drawing board when my heart takes its last beat.  

Immediately, I will return to writing about a broader range of political and social issues, something I have done for the past fifteen years for several publications, publishing most often at The Rag Blog.  My next article for that platform is, nevertheless, about how I was involved in forming a Hemlock chapter in Austin, Texas, in the mid-90s and my subsequent work for FEN.  In addition, I am working on a presentation for a virtual conference in September for the Funeral Consumers Alliance, on the topic “Seven Ways to Die with Dementia–Some Thoughts about Advance Planning.”

In August, responsibility for the blog is being transferred to the capable hands of FEN board member Kevin Bradley.

Kevin is a writer, speaker, stress management counselor, and ordained chaplain. He is an Associate Exit Guide, is on FEN’s Board of Directors, and participates in FEN’s Speakers Bureau. He also provides spiritual counseling to FEN clients, families, and volunteers upon request. His experience as a hospital and hospice chaplain have given him first-hand knowledge of the inadequacies of the healthcare system in providing end-of-life care. As would be expected of a FEN activist, Kevin is a staunch advocate of individual freedom.  Like all of us who volunteer for FEN, he supports the right of all people to determine the time and manner of their own death.

Kevin will bring his own perspective to right-to-die issues and concerns, a perspective formed by his unique experiences, both personal and professional.

I will continue to serve FEN’s mission as a substitute coordinator when needed and as an Associate Exit Guide.  When the spirit moves, I may also contribute to the blog.  All of my previous contributions and those of most of the other contributors were patiently edited by my spouse of more than fifty-one years, June Chase Hankins, who had a long career teaching English and literature courses at the university level.  Her dissertation was in the field of composition and rhetoric, and she did her best to correct my deficiencies in those areas and make up for many of the mistakes I made as a result of the sociological, psychological, and legal writing that once were a major part of my reading and professional work.

I am enormously grateful to everyone who has contributed to the blog during my tenure as its editor/writer/moderator, as well as to the kind volunteers and staff members of FEN who have helped make this venture possible.  I will not try to name each of you, but I do want to remember my first mentor as a trained volunteer with FEN–Juanita Ainsley, whose death two years ago was a great loss for FEN and our efforts to expand personal freedom.  She believed that everyone should have the right to direct their own lives, and she labored to help clients find the personal freedom they sought.

Others who enriched my life over the entire time I have been a volunteer for FEN are those who contacted FEN and with whom I talked about their suffering, their concerns, and their struggles.  I wanted to help them, but they also helped me; they helped clarify what was important, and they displayed great courage in the face of adversity, strengthening my own resolve to continue working for the right of all people to choose the course of their own life.

We who believe that our Constitution guarantees both the liberty and the privacy that support a right to die take some comfort in the words of the late Supreme Court Justice William Brennan, in a speech delivered in 1985:

For the genius of the Constitution rests not in any static meaning it might have had in a world that is dead and gone, but in the adaptability of its great principles to cope with current problems and current needs.  If we are to be as a shining city upon a hill, it will be because of our ceaseless pursuit of the constitutional ideal of human dignity.

For me, human dignity requires both the liberty and the privacy guaranteed by the Constitution that should allow each of us to decide when it is time to leave this life on our terms.  If we keep working toward that goal, we may achieve it.  In the meantime, state assistance-in-dying laws and the work of Final Exit Network will fill in the constitutional gaps in our political, social, and cultural lives.

Gracias a la vida! (Thanks to life!)

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P.S.–I will leave you with a few items I have been reading or viewing or listening to that are relevant to EOL matters:

1. The American Clinicians Academy on Medical Aid in Dying held a conference in February.  The 17 sessions are now available free online here.

2. Essay on “Are mental health patients entitled to see their medical notes?” 

3. An online meeting of the Hemlock Society of San Diego discusses the work of Final Exit Network here.

4.  “What Makes a Good Life in Late Life? Citizenship and Justice in Aging Societies” – 15 essays from the Hastings Center.  Free access to the articles is here.

5.. Pete Seeger’s 1996 album Pete, which includes some songs reflecting on getting older and the continuity of our struggles, both personal and social.