Another Dimension of Death.(Brief Article)

As fate would have it (and I swear this is true), only moments after I sat down to write on the fateful case of Robert Wendland my son came by to ask me to lend him a hand. David informed me (with a deadline 12 hours away!) that his AP history assignment was to research the cultural significance of Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone.

A wave of deja`vu swept over me. The Wendland case not only carries immense cultural significance, when you read about the battle this courageous 49-year-old man and his elderly mother are fighting, you're struck by the sense that, indeed, "You're traveling through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind; a journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination. That's the signpost up ahead - - your next stop, the Twilight Zone!" Or San Francisco.

Come with me to a quiet courtroom in the city by the bay just a few weeks back. Seven justices of the California Supreme Court are earnestly engaging attorneys for both sides. Mr. Wendland's wife, Rose, is asking the court to allow her to have food and fluids removed from her husband who, while severely disabled, is neither terminally ill nor in a so-called "persistent vegetative state (PVS)," according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

While the trial court held there is no "clear and convincing" evidence that Wendland would wish to die an ugly death from dehydration, most media outlets frame his fate as the latest chapter in the ongoing "right to die" saga. To reporters caught up in the rhetoric, it's as if Robert Wendland is updating Patrick Henry. It's now "Give Me Liberty, which is Death."

The rub for those who are determined to remove his only source of food and water is that Mr. Wendland is clearly not in a PVS or "permanently unconscious," the reigning criteria for dehydrating people to death. Well, how to thread that needle? For starters, coin a new euphemism that not only sounds awful but minimizes his humanity: Wendland is said to be in a "minimally conscious state."

Understand that this factoid is a term that can be found in no medical textbook or medical journal. Rather it's one of those handy-dandy handles slapped on Wendland to get around the medical realities.

If you can believe initial press accounts, members of the California Supreme Court were skeptical, perhaps because they recognized how wide a net a decision supporting Rose Wendland might cast. As the Chronicle put it, legal experts predict that a ruling in this area "could affect stroke victims, Alzheimer's patients and hundred of thousands of others suffering from degenerative mental disease."