Suicide and Storm

In October 2002 the Angels were playing in the World Series, and the D.C. Snipers were taking lives, and I was trying to end my life.

I tried to end my life in my usual way: by starvation.

I had booked a flight to Germany and told my brother and law partner that I was going on vacation. Between booking and departure, I decided to die. The timing was favorable: by the time anybody wondered where I was, my track would be obscure.

I packed on the day that I was supposed to leave for Germany. I packed a small tent, a sleeping bag, a gas lantern, fuel, water bottles, iodine pills, a Bible, Don Quixote, a radio, extra batteries, and many cartons of cigarettes.

Then I took a cab toward Forest Falls. I didn’t take my own car, because I didn’t want my parked car to proclaim my nearness. I had the cab driver pull over before we got to the town.

Along the road to Forest Falls, a stream runs behind trees and brush. I hiked along a little-traveled trail next to the stream until I found a flat space large enough to pitch my tent in. The stream ran between my camp and the trail.

I purified stream water with the iodine pills. Since I planned to die, it might seem strange that I bothered to purify the water. But I was particular of my mode of death. And I wanted to die in relative comfort. In my last days, I didn’t want the agonies of giardia.

I passed the time. I smoked. I had calculated how long it would take to die, and I rationed my cigarettes to last to the end. At first, I smoked one cigarette every waking half hour. Then I started to think that I would outlive my estimate. So I cut back to one cigarette per hour. Between cigarettes, I checked my watch often to see when I could smoke my next cigarette.

I remember reading Don Quixote. I don’t remember reading the Bible. That’s not to say that I didn’t read it.

I listened to the World Series on the radio. I would miss parts of the games, because the radio’s reception wasn’t 100%. I was glad that the Angels won.

Death was proximate, but I wasn’t done with the worries of the world. A client’s legal brief was due in the Court of Appeal. One day, I hiked a mile or so to a Christian retreat center that I knew about, and I used their pay phone to call my brother to tell him who he should hire to write the brief. I recall making more than one trip to the retreat center to make calls. I don’t remember what the other calls were about. The walk to the retreat center was steep, and I knew that in time I would no longer have the strength to make the walk.

One day a young woman and her large dog came by my camp. The dog approached me, the woman didn’t. I petted the dog for a while, then they left.

I was calm while I waited to die. I was starving to death because I chose to starve to death. I knew that my strength would dwindle and then I would starve to death because I could not walk to safety. I accepted that.

Then the rain came. It was a huge storm. I stayed inside my tent, except to replenish my water and to urinate. The stream between my camp and the trail grew wider, deeper, and swifter. After a time, I saw that it was going to overwhelm my camp, so I tried to climb to higher ground. But my camp was hemmed in by thick bushes. I later found out they were poison oak.

The water rose. I foresaw death by being swept away in the flood, tumbling in the icy water until my head smashed into a rock. That wasn’t what I had planned, or wanted. I was reconciled to death by starvation, but not by the violence of a swift, cold flood.

So I made a decision. I knew that if I waited, I wouldn’t be able to enter the deepening, racing water without being swept away. I abandoned my camp and strained through the water to the trail. I made my way back to a picnic area and shivered. I had been in the camp for 26 days.

I walked to the road and called 9-1-1 on a emergency roadside phone. I told the operator who I was, and where I was. Deputy sheriffs came. As I sat in the back of a patrol car, the deputy asked me where I had camped, because he had looked and couldn’t find me. This stirred two reactions in me: astonishment that he knew that I was in the area (the trips to the retreat center must have tipped somebody off); and amazement at how lackadaisical his effort to find me had been. I was not all that hard to find if you knew that I was in the area.

I was taken to the county mental ward. It was unpleasant. They gave me a turkey sandwich that was so dry and tasteless that, even though I had not eaten in 26 days, I could not eat it. I was in a large room for hours with other involuntary detainees, while we waited to be screened for admission to the ward.

Two security guards controlled the room. They stood at a lectern in the middle of the room, channel surfing the TV. They shouted at the detainees. Without consulting professionals, they put people into solitary confinement. One young man wouldn’t stay in his chair. He slid out of his chair and lay on the floor in front of it – a crazy guy acting crazy, but not violent and not dangerous. The security guards confined him.

One of the detainees was a former client of mine. He was seriously schizophrenic. When his father was alive, his father took care of him. But his father had died, and he was alone in the world.

But I was afraid that he would see me and want to talk. When he was off his meds, he would babble. Listening to him, you could recognize words in his speech, and you could recognize that his sentences had grammatical structure, but you couldn’t make sense of what he was saying. If you tried to listen to him, he exhausted you mentally with no actual communication to reward the effort. So I sank down in my cushioned chair and covered my face as best I could with my hands. He didn’t see me among the twenty-some other detainees. When he fell asleep, I relaxed.

In time I was screened. I quickly told the screener that I had private insurance. I was eager to leave the county ward for the relative comfort of a private institution.

A privately-run treatment center sent an attractive, nice-seeming woman to collect me. On the way to her car, we left the county lock-up and walked to the front of the building and the glass door. It was still raining hard.

Inside the door, an old man stood looking out. He was homeless. He had feigned being a danger to himself to get out of the rain, to get a few free meals. It’s an old ruse. His ruse had been discovered, and he had been ejected from bedlam. He looked out at the watery maelstrom, unable to make himself walk into it.

What we Think when we Love Health-Care Reform, or Hate It.

Ken Karst, my constitutional-law professor, said there are only two principles of constitutional law. The first one is "Oh come on!" The second one is "Oh no you don’t!" Alright, I think his tongue was in his cheek.

But I think of Professor Karst when I think of the battle in the courts about health-care reform. There’s a lot of hullabaloo about constitutional originalism, and the Commerce Clause. Federal judges who have issued decisions on health-care reform are divided. I think it comes down to "Oh come on" versus "Oh no you don’t".

And let me go further. I think that, in the health-care-reform debate, a judge chooses "Oh come on" versus "Oh no you don’t" according to his or her relative affinity to two other principles.

Those principles are love-your-neighbor and social Darwinism.

I’ll explain that, but first let’s look at the issue that’s getting batted back and forth in federal courts. It’s the same issue that pundits argue about on television, and that people debate about on Facebook.

When people complain about the health-care reform (and if they haven’t drunk the death-panels Kool-Aid) they complain about the mandate to buy insurance. They complain that government has no right to make people buy health insurance.

The unpopular health-insurance mandate is necessary to carry out the most popular part of health-insurance reform: ensuring coverage for people with pre-existing conditions. A young woman growing up might have a weak heart. But she can’t stay on her parents’ health plan forever, and she won’t be able to get her own health insurance with her weak heart. Insurance companies ruthlessly screen out prospective customers who actually need health care. Health-care consumers are expensive. Healthy people are profitable for health-insurance companies. So, under current practice, health insurance is sold only to the healthy.

To combat the plight of this woman with the weak heart, and countless persons like her, the new law won’t let health-insurance companies deny coverage because of pre-existing conditions.

But, standing alone, that’s a prescription for abuse. Because if you could get health insurance any time you wanted it, even if you waited until you were sick, then nobody would buy it when they were healthy. Only sick people would buy insurance. And because everybody in the system was sick, it would be hugely expensive – not really "insurance" at all.

So the insurance mandate is necessary to keep people from gaming the system. It keeps health-insurance affordable and available to people with pre-existing conditions.

To be clear: without the insurance mandate, you can’t fairly require health-insurance companies to take in people with pre-existing conditions. It wouldn’t work.

So the insurance mandate is necessary so that people with pre-existing conditions can get health insurance.

Now, you can take two approaches to this. You can say, "The government has no right to make me buy health insurance." And, basically, that casts adrift people with pre-existing conditions. "That’s not my problem", you say. Fair enough. Lots of people agree with you. But let’s call that what it is: social Darwinism. Every man for himself. The smart and strong and rich and healthy survive. The weaklings – for example, the woman with the weak heart – they die. "And good riddance" you might say.

Here’s the opposite approach. You might not like to buy health insurance. But you do a lot of things only because you live in a cooperative society. You stop at red lights, even if you’re in a hurry. You contribute to the common defense and to infrastructure when you pay taxes, even though you might want to buy a big-screen TV instead. You serve on jury duty, even though you might be busy at work. You do these things because the benefits of living in a cooperative society outweigh the benefits of doing your own thing in an every-man-for-himself "society".

Politics is largely occupied with calibrating the balance between cooperative society and every-man-for-himself. This calibration is fundamental to the health-insurance-reform debate.

Even though you might not want health insurance, you get value for your money. It provides a good service that you might need. And by agreeing to take on this unwanted benefit, you are ensuring that people with preexisting conditions can have affordable health care. You are saving lives. You are loving your neighbor.

So: social Darwinism versus love-your-neighbor.

Some will say: This is an oversimplification. I answer: You’re right. But I think it’s a useful oversimplification. I think it approaches truth. I think that a social-Darwinist every-man-for-himself philosophy swirls in the psyche of every opponent of health-care reform.

Even Christians. Especially Christians. I’m not sentimental or naive about church-goers. The parable of the tares and the wheat (Matthew 13:24-43), to me, doesn’t just speak to the difference between two people sitting next to each other at the counter of a café. It’s also about two people sitting next to each other on the pew of a church. Here’s how far I go: it’s even about two ideas reposing in the mind of a Christian.

Examine your mind. See if there isn’t some social Darwinism every-man-for-himself in there. If there is, decide if you want it there. When I examine myself, I find it. In my best on-Earth-as-it-is-in-Heaven way, I try to correct it. Imperfectly. Very imperfectly. But then, on my better days, I’m pretty unimpressed with my own morality. On my better days.

If you oppose health-care reform, decide if you really think that your freedom not to buy health insurance is more important to you than the health of somebody who can’t get insurance because of a pre-existing condition.

It’s your money, but it’s his or her life.