Death and Taxes — Minus the Taxes

When my daughter was four, the subject of Ted Williams' alleged decision (it has strongly been disputed by family members) to have his head frozen somehow came up in conversation. I explained to her that before they died, many people would express their wishes about what they would like to have done to their bodies. Some chose cremation, others chose burial, or in the case of Williams, it was (according to his son anyway) to be frozen. She was fascinated by this and for weeks afterward upon being introduced to an adult she would ask, "What's your choice?"

Fortunately, in our society even if someone chooses to freeze his head so that one day it will thawed out and attached to a body that will hit .410 in a season, they can. As ridiculous as that is, however, relatively few can choose how to end their own lives, even when all hope of any kind of a quality existence is gone.

How did this happen? A big reason is that whenever anyone puts forward a serious proposal about end-of-life counseling or the right-to-die, someone like Sarah Palin starts screeching about Nazi-like death panels, (as if she even knew anything about World War II history; she probably thinks the Final Solution is a way to break a tie at the top of the final college football rankings).

The question of whether people have a right to opt out of this life is not a new one, and the topic has received much more sober attention in The Nation. To accompany this week's review by Alexander Provan of two books concerning death and how we view it and experience it, I thought I'd offer up this link to a fascinating debate on the subject of euthanasia between Harry Benjamin and Martin Gumpert that appeared in this pages in 1950.

While searching through the archives, I also came across two other fascinating stories on related topics: a commentary on the work of Jack Kevorkian and a 1928 article on the excessively high costs of funerals. All three are well worth your attention.

Toward the end of his long life, my friend Bill Reuben used to say with a shrug, "Well, no one gets out of here alive." He was right of course, so sooner or later death is going to have to be part of the national discourse. As for my choice, the idea of spending eternity on a shelf next to a pint of Ben & Jerry's Fish Food has its appeal -- as long as they lock me up in there with a spoon. That's not too much to ask, is it?

Have a question about any aspect of The Nation's archives or its history? Drop me a line at jeff.kisseloff@gmail.com To be notified of new posts to this blog, follow me on twitter @jeffisme.

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