'If my dad couldn’t control his body, he at least wanted to control how long he would be in it.'
Guest WriterThe author with his dad and sister, Erika, in a photo for a 1983 Multiple Sclerosis READaTHON brochure
Despite these efforts, the disease unleashed a torturous progression, slowly destroying his physical abilities. He started needing a cane to walk, which brought challenges for an owner of a small engineering firm that inspected construction sites. He refocused business toward serving as an expert witness in litigation, until the day he had to take a cab two blocks from where he parked because he couldn’t walk that far and he barely had the energy to testify.
Two years after that trip, Erika left for college, too. By this time, four years before his death, he was alternating between a wheelchair and a hospital bed that had been moved into his living room. Visits from nurses and Meals On Wheels were his only regular in-person social interactions. I made the two-hour drive to visit regularly during college. After a post-college move to Boston, my visits became less frequent, and I could observe his noticeable physical decline over a period of months.
That first phone call was made, followed by many more to formulate the logistics of getting a bedridden man from Colorado to Michigan, where Kevorkian lived. A close friend from his car-racing years set up his van to accommodate that hospital bed, and a longtime nurse accompanied the two of them.
Dad decided to die on Aug. 29, his 56th birthday. The idea came from “The Shootist,” John Wayne’s last movie, in which he played a notorious gunman diagnosed with cancer. Given weeks to live, Wayne’s character arranged a final, fatal shootout on his birthday.
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