Thread by presidio9.
After a day of uncertainty, Sen. Sam Brownback of Kansas said Tuesday he would vote to confirm Gov. Kathleen Sebelius for secretary of health and human services.
“The president won the election and has nominated a Kansan to the Cabinet,” Brownback said in a statement. “Despite our profound policy differences, I will support my fellow Kansan.”
Brownback joined Sen. Pat Roberts, who also made his intentions known Tuesday. . .
Thread by me.
In his new book, The Last Goodnights: Assisting My Parents with Their Suicides, lawyer and author John West publicly tells a story that most people would have kept silent. He does it so that one day others may be able to kill openly and without fear. That’s not how West puts it, of course, but I’m afraid that’s what it boils down to.
West’s parents were prestigious psychiatrists. As West wrote, “Neither was at all religious, but both had deep insight into the human condition. . . . And they knew what they wanted.”
What they wanted was to die “on [their] own terms.” When West’s father was diagnosed with cancer, he asked his son for help in taking his own life. In West’s mother’s case, “advancing cognitive decline” led her to fear that she would “turn into a bowl of Jell-O in her head.” A couple of weeks after West assisted his father’s suicide, his mother made the same request.
It’s hard to listen to West talk about his parents’ deaths, as he recently did on NPR’s Diane Rehm Show. As he describes it, when talking about their impending deaths, his parents kept resorting to euphemisms like “do the trick” and “achieve the goal.”
No euphemism, however, can do away with the stark reality of death and what West had to do to kill them. For instance, he had to wake his father, who was groggy from pain pills given to him by a hospice worker, in order to take the extra pills that would kill him. West admitted that his father might not have finished taking the pills had he, the son, not fed them to him. . .