The panel was stacked against Death. Death never had a chance. Sure, it seemed like portents of demise were everywhere that day: in the doom-haunted sky, where wildfire smoke filtered the dwindling sunlight into a sickly, apocalyptic orange; on the radio, where R.E.M. (really!) sang "It's the End of the World as We Know It (and I Feel Fine)"; in my skull, where a headache was registering 9.5 on the Richter scale, leveling whole Chinese villages.
But inside the Sahara West Library, where a couple dozen (mostly older) people gathered in a meeting room for a "Life and Living, Death and Dying" seminar last Thursday, Death was outgunned. The three-member expert panel—a hospice doctor, a rabbi and a priest—was so obviously biased toward life and living that had Death been able to make it, helping himself to a doughnut and coffee before settling into a plastic chair and smoothing his cowl, he'd have left in disgust by the potty break, crabbing about the lack of fair time.
The seminar was sponsored by the new Las Vegas Center for Jewish Education, Media and the Arts, in response to the cultural nerves exposed by the Terri Schiavo case. Panelists were Dr. Stewart Stein, medical director of the Nathan Adelson Hospice; Rabbi Yocheved Mintz of Valley Outreach Synagogue; and Father Kevin McAuliffe of St. Elizabeth Seton Church. To help them expound on their common theme—perhaps best phrased thusly: life rules! death sucks!—the moderator posed a series of fictional scenarios, each trying to drill down through the easy certainties and glib maxims that surround the question of how to manage death.
The first scenario had to do with a young motorcyclist unconscious after a crash. Doctors can easily save him by amputating his mangled leg ... or try to save his leg with a riskier operation that would lower his odds of survival to 80 percent. The only person around to make the decision is his girlfriend of three months. The doctors turn to her: What do you want us to do?
A few drawbacks with the process became immediately apparent. The premise here is that a legless motorcyclist can't ride and therefore has no real quality of life, an argument that didn't register at a high emotional level with this AARP-ready crowd. Even more notably, in this and the other scenarios, the panelists were unable to put aside their life-is-precious theology long enough to brave a deep exploration of the other side.
"Life," Rabbi Mintz said matter-of-factly, "is more important than the leg," which is hard to argue with as a religious principle, but what if you're not blessed with divine conviction? Then it sounds an awful lot like a glib maxim. What if the body part at risk was more obviously central to the victim's core identity—a pianist's hands, an artist's eyes, a gigolo's ... OK, sure, that argument falls apart at some point, but it's not as simple as saying, as each panelist did, that you always err on the side of life.
For the most part, it was up to the audience to nudge things in more complicated directions. "I would be so angry," one woman said, putting herself in the place of the subject in Scenario 2, an unconscious stroke victim whose husband is considering whether to have an oxygen tube inserted, against her wishes. "If you left me trapped in my body, I wouldn't be happy."
The third fictional case study involved a cancer victim who wanted to die—couldn't take it anymore, was sick of the pain, the depletion of his life and energy. "How many of you would just want to end it?" the moderator asked. It's a question whose answer seems obvious, but when I looked around, there was only one hand in the air, and it was at the end of my arm. My headache rose to 9.6.
"I guess I'm just pragmatic about it," I said. "If I'm at the point where I'm not coming back, I guess I just want to get a move on." Had Death been there, he'd have given me a bony thumbs-up with his non-doughnut hand. As it was, there were a few chuckles, and from behind me a murmur of agreement from the youngish fellow who whispered, "If they believe it's so great on the other side, why make people stay here, in pain?"
Although McAuliffe didn't hear him, he might've sensed the question hanging in the air, because as the session drew to its end, he offered a few thoughts on the value of suffering. Catholics don't seek it out or want it to happen, he said. "But if suffering is given to us, it's very often a doorway to something greater." In some ways, he added, modern life "has become a little too sanitized, a little too individualistic ..." If I followed his thinking correctly, he said that a "sense of community" can form around a death as family and friends gather to console and pray for the person dying, making it an event of wider significance than the passing of one person.
That's when it hit me: I'm glad I'm not Catholic.
For the record: If I'm ever in a motorcycle wreck, I like the 80 percent odds; try to save the leg. If my headache mushrooms into a stroke, don't keep me alive by any means more aggressive than a Diet Coke drip. I want to be firm about this.
On my way out, Death stopped me for a chat. Turns out he did show up but sat way in the back. "Nice work in there," he said. "Word of advice: Don't do your usual 85 on the freeway tonight. I'm just sayin'." He winked a lidless wink and was gone.