APA Newsletters

Spring 2001
Volume 00, Number 2

Newsletter on Philosophy and Medicine

Papers, Poems and Narratives

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Prometheus Moth

Kathleen Dean Moore
Oregon State University

I was standing with the doctor in the kitchen of my father's house, leaning against the stove. The handle of the oven door was pressing into my back, and I was staring across the room at the moths and butterflies behind glass, framed and mounted on the kitchen wall. It was full-blown summer, a sweet July morning, the kind of morning when my father would have been sitting in a lawn chair outside, reading the paper, greeting his neighbors, inching the chair across the driveway to keep it in the sun. I was a thousand miles from home, and I missed my children.

"Would you like me to do something?" the doctor asked me. "Is it time?"

This should have been an easy decision. My father and his doctor were longtime friends and intellectual companions. On dark, wintry evenings, they stayed up late, the two scientists, and talked about right and wrong, about life, about death. These were pragmatic, Depression-raised men, problem-solvers. If they were dying in pain, they wanted the dying to be quick, and then everyone could get on to other things. The doctor and I were both sure we knew what my father wanted.

And it clearly was time. My father's body was dying faster than he was. We couldn't roll him over in bed without leaving dents in his thighs. Where the skin on his back was sloughing away, only the sheets bound him together. His lips moved sometimes, but we couldn't make out any words, and his eyes never opened. He breathed in loud whispers, then stopped, then cried out and breathed some more. Sometimes he seemed to sob, and once he squeezed my hand (although I may have imagined that), but there was no question in my mind that he was in pain, and that it was a pain the doctor could not end.

But I could. I could say one word. I could say yes, and my father's best friend would give him enough painkillers to kill him. My children and husband would come and I wouldn't be alone, and after awhile, I would get to go home. I have never been so lonely in my life. If I said yes, my sisters would land at the airport and I would be there to meet them and we would hug and cry and say how good it was that the pain was over, and how this is what Dad would have wanted, and then we would organize things in the house. We are good organizers. Things for the estate sale. Things for the library. Things for my sisters' families. Things for mine. We would remember to cancel his magazine subscriptions. We wouldn't talk about how he died. His friends would bring casserole dishes, and my aunt would bring a ham, and we would send them off with hugs and some little memento-a brass anchor on a bookend, a biologist's hand lens, a framed photograph of a monarch butterfly laying eggs. There would be lots of hugs.

Years ago, when I visited my father, I used to sit with him in the morning sun and greet the neighbors. The neighborhood had grown old along with my father, and the people who passed were life-long friends. On doctor's orders, they walked around and around the block, never getting too far from home, stopping to chat each time they passed. My old playschool teacher came by each morning-was she eighty-five this year or eighty-six?-not so much walking, as falling forward and catching herself each step with a leg swung from the hip. She's in terrible shape, my father confided, but I could see that for myself. But she always remembered my name, which is really something, since most of the people in my hometown know we're all Dean girls, but can't tell one of us from another, and which is the one who lives in Oregon?

She didn't come by on my next visit, but the corner neighbor stopped to talk. "Had I heard?" she asked cautiously. The playschool teacher was dead. She had died. That's what had happened. She had died.

But what had really happened was that she and her husband had gone down to the river in the city park, carrying a picnic basket and the family quilt. They didn't eat a picnic. Instead, they spread the quilt on the grassy bank and lay down side by side. Then he pulled a gun from the picnic basket and shot her in the head, spattering the playschool teacher's blood across the intersecting rings of calico, across the tiny patches of bright fabric from small children's dresses and the aprons of the elderly aunts who loved them. Then he shot himself. My father told me this, and he told me he thought they had done the right thing. "How much he must have loved her!" my father said. I looked up smiling to meet his eyes, expecting to see them filled with tears. Instead, his look was hard and sharp and pointed, like an eagle's.

"It should never have happened like that," my sisters and I agreed on the phone. "People should be able to end their lives cleanly, privately, without spoiling the quilt. Their children should have helped them. Doctors should have helped them." In the park, no less: we were shaken by this. Of course they would want to die in a beautiful place, that's surely why they chose the river-but right there, dying where children come to play? Where the creek runs down the shale bank under the big-leaf maple trees? Right there, next to the jewelweed and the bees?

If I say yes, what will my father think? Will he think, I knew I could trust her to figure out what is right and do it without flinching? She always was my problem-solver, and she came through in the end. Will he be proud of me? His pride has motivated me all my life. Why should it be different now?

Will he protest? But I was still alive. I could hear the children coming home from school. I could follow the leafy paths of my thoughts. I was remembering a picnic spread along a fallen log, and my daughter killed me. My own daughter.

If I say yes, will his feelings be hurt? In the end, when she was lonely, she killed me to get this over with, so her family would come. That's all she wanted, all she cared about-someone to comfort her. Maybe I should have told her to go home and live her life, and she would have gone, and she wouldn't have needed to kill me.

If I say no, maybe he'll say, she could have stopped the pain, and she didn't. The last betrayal: my own daughter did not stop the pain. If I say no, maybe he'll say, she loved me, but she was afraid. Will he understand? Well, it's got to be hard. I can absorb the pain she couldn't bear-what else are fathers for?

Sometimes, these last years, my father would call me on the phone and leave a message on my machine. He would be crying from the pain, and he would say I should come and help him. I'm standing in my office holding a sheaf of student exams, and my machine is crying. I frantically press the buttons and the doctor says, "I know, I was there when he placed the call, I can't stop bone-cancer pain without killing him, I wanted to tell you that." I would call my father back and he would be asleep, and I wouldn't come, and I wouldn't help him.

All our lives, when my sisters and I have had a problem we couldn't solve, we have taken it to my father. I remember one night when my sister was working late to finish up an insect collection for her science assignment. She had collected at least fifty insects-ants and bees and butterflies and even a bombardier beetle-and put them in glass jars with carbon tetrachloride. Then she shook them out of the jars and mounted them on long, black pins. One big Prometheus moth would not be killed. While she held it by the abdomen and tried to skewer it to the board, it fluttered and flinched. She poked and missed, poked again, got a new grip on the moth. Sobbing, she tried again and again to stick it through without tearing the beautiful brown eyes on its soft wings. I ran to get my father. He came down the stairs, saw at once the situation, put the moth back into the jar, gave it a walloping dose of carbon tet, hugged my sister, pulled out the moth, and stuck it to the board. It quivered in place, the eyes on its wings wide in astonishment.

I've got to think harder and better now than I've ever thought in my life. I should try to list the pros and cons in two columns and weigh them out, the way he taught me, but I can't make it work. Mercy-killing is an enormous act. When I try to weigh out the consequences, the huge fact of it knocks over the careful balance of advantage and disadvantage, scattering the brass weights, sending every other consideration spinning heavily across the floor. It's a Promethean act, dangerous and proud-for better or for worse, stealing fire from the gods. It is beyond ethical categories. It is beyond laws and two signatures and review panels. Nothing requires it. Nothing justifies it. Greater than justice, it is an act of mercy, an act of love. It's a wrong that cannot be forgiven, a sharp-eyed, hard-beaked eagle tearing at Prometheus' immortal liver. It's the greatest gift one person can give another, a gift of stupendous, titanic love.

The silence in the kitchen is starting to congeal, taking on substance that fills the air and seems to glisten. Through the window I can see a neighbor walking by, looking carefully at the house, probably wondering if this is a good time to stop and deciding not. There are robins on the lawn, up to their hips in thick green grass that needs to be mowed. They poke and chirrup, hopping into the air, settling again. I can see the neighbor boy fiddling with the lawn mower in his driveway, getting ready to come over to mow my father's grass, something he has done every week for the past three months. If my father can hear, he will love the sound of a lawn mower starting up and moving back and forth across the lawn, louder and quieter, coming and going. In the end, the sound of the lawn mower is the only thing I know for sure.

"No," I said. "Not today."

Reprinted from Holdfast: At Home in the Natural World, by permission of The Lyons Press (1-800-836-0510).

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APA Newsletters

Spring 2001 Volume 00, Number 2

Spring 2001
Volume 00, Number 2