This appears in a pre-2010 issue
of cc&d magazine.
Saddle-stitched issues are no longer
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“Sometimes we force-feed life on others.”
“What do you mean?”
“The cancer devoured my mother,” the middle-aged man revealed. “If only she had lived in Oregon...not New York!”
“And if she had...?”
“Oregon passed a law that...well, physician-assisted suicide’s legal there.”
“But not here-in New York City?”
“Yeah.”
“Did she suffer much?”
“Too much. Beyond human comprehension.”
He took a deep breath and sat silently in the black leather chair across from me, where a spiraling silence seemed to swallow us. We sat in the center of my circular room, a whirlpool of unbearable emotion, launching us into a swirling vertigo, and I waited.
He spoke again, just above a whisper: “It ate her flesh and even...her soul. Like a beast of terrorism, it tortured her. Why couldn’t Mother die a swift, soft, and gentle death? Painless and majestic.”
He looked quizzically at me. I was mute. Couldn’t play G-d! We sat silently, struggling to figure out why living in New York was so unholy-so cruel. Yet in the Waste Land of my soul, a distant voice whispered: Beware, my well-intentioned brother. New York may someday have a law which authorizes physician-assisted suicide. What will happen to us, my alter ego, if we travel on this dark road? Shall we discover bliss or ineffable evil? Beware!
