Damn! Dr. Death has died.

I shook hands with Dr. Death in an East Lansing alley once.

It was sometime back in the 1990s and Dr. Jack Kevorkian was at the East Lansing Art Fair along with thousands of other fairgoers. If he was trying to go unnoticed, he was failing. A small crowd of supporters and people-who-are-drawn-to-famous-people had surrounded him in an alley and he was shaking hands and looking a bit uncomfortable.

I remember thinking, “He’s just a scared-looking old man in a fishing hat.”

This frail old guy in a sweater – probably the most famous euthanasia advocate in the world – helped more than 130 terminally-ill patients to end their lives by injection, carbon monoxide and the famous “suicide machine” he built to enable them to kill themselves at the touch of a button. (The machine gave patients a narcotic followed by a lethal dose of potassium chloride.) Those he assisted between 1990 and 2000 included people with multiple sclerosis, Lou Gehrig’s disease, cancer, heart disease and AIDS.

In 1998 he helped a seriously ill man to die and allowed a recording of the event to be shown on “60 Minutes.” He was found guilty of murder in 1999 and sentenced to 10 to 25 years in prison; he served eight before being paroled in 2007 for good behavior.

Dr. Kevorkian, who liked painting and jazz music as well as instigating controversy, died early this morning in a metro Detroit hospital at the age of 83.

You’ve got to respect a guy who serves eight years in prison not for stealing or destroying anything but for trying to help people stop suffering. I wonder how many of us were forced to examine how we felt about doctor-assisted suicide by a pathologist with an Armenian name from Detroit.

Thanks, Dr. Kevorkian. Rest in peace.


Source: Washington Post