DR. DEATH, A '90S CELEBRITY

By WILFRID SHEED

Dr. Jack Kevorkian seems for now to have reached Celebrity Heaven, the very Eye of the Hoopla, which is to say he is never completely out of the news these days, what with going to court or coming from court or explaining what happened in court. "Thank God for the jury system," said his lawyer, Geoffrey Fieger, after the Doc's latest trial in Michigan, and well he might. Simply by punching a couple of jury-pleasing buttons, the team of Kevorkian and Fieger should be able to keep their show on the boards and out of jail forever, until the Law stops puffing after them and the networks pull the plug.

"I only recognize laws passed by a legislature, not made up by courts," Kevorkian said in Michigan, thus pushing button No. 1, distrust of the legal system. Since a large body of common law evolved in court, this is tantamount to throwing out half the book before the show even begins. Button No. 2 and the clincher at the Michigan trial was a simple video of Kevorkian's latest subjects begging to be allowed to die. Just reading their words into the record might not have done the trick, and screams of pain could have been counterproductive. But the sight and sound of two Americans requesting autonomy proved just the thing, and Dr. Death walked once again. As Fieger put it two weekends ago in the court of Andy Rooney (where maybe all future trials should be held), "Government has no business telling you when you have to"--and here the transcript indicates a slight pause, as if the speaker were choosing among possibilities. Has the government the right to tell anyone anything these days?--"telling you how much you have to suffer before you die."

Yes indeed. But should anyone have this awesome right? And if so, who? Dr. Kevorkian seems surprisingly vague on this point. The people who decide to end pain and life with one stroke should "be specified," he told Rooney, "I don't care by who." He finally plumps for the medical profession itself to choose future "Dr. Deaths," but his relations with organized medicine have always been as mutually contemptuous as his relations with courts, churches and anything else that's organized. Each generation chooses its celebrities, as one casts a play, to act out the stories that particularly interest it, and one can imagine the doctor winding up in Montana someday, awaiting word from some authority he can finally recognize.

Anyhow, as a doctor Kevorkian can only repeat himself now; but a celebrity has to keep moving. So--should he become a nice guy, or concentrate on staying out front? Maybe Don Rickles can advise him on this. But whatever he decides, Dr. Kevorkian won't really be out front anymore. That place was taken for 15 minutes just last week by a gang of anonymous nurses, one of five of whom confessed in a poll published by the New England Journal of Medicine to "hastening death" in intensive-care cases.

Although both the poll and what the nurses meant by hastening are still being hotly questioned, the story at least brings the focus back where it belongs. Historically, euthanasia talks have always broken down over who gets to pull the trigger. Even the Germans of the 1930s drew the line when Hitler got into euthanasia. Strangers can never decide whose life is worth living, because strangers by definition don't know enough; but neither do friends, because the outside of an illness is so different from the inside. To the eye of Health, any number of conditions may seem quite hopeless: quadriplegia, blindness--how can anyone live with these? Yet on the inside the patient may be bubbling over with ecstasy or rage or despair over something quite unrelated. Happiness seems to proceed on a quite separate track from health, and anyone who's had a major disease has likely had a sense that his loved ones are suffering either much less or much more than himself. Superficially, doctors might seem to combine the best of stranger and friend. Yet even doctors know outsides much better than insides, and have been known to suffer tortures upon hearing that they have a fatal illness themselves, because they know outsides all too well.

If despair is treatable and transient in healthy people, it's often as much so or more in sick ones. Yet there comes a time in some illnesses when both outside and in are filled with nothing but pain and will continue to be until the inevitable end--at which point, someone throughout history nearly always pulls the trigger, legally or not. And the someone has always been the professionals on the spot, the loved ones if possible and whatever is left of the patient, in a consensus of surrender. It isn't cool or precise, but it's the best we can do.

But all this is so far from being news that Rooney talked in the interview of an age-old understanding, "a tacit agreement among doctors" to do just that. And he asked Dr. Kevorkian, "Have you ruined that for them?" To which the doctor answered with stunning and quite startling humility: "I don't think so, but I might have."