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Although both the poll and what the nurses meant by hastening are still being hotly questioned, the story at least brings the focus back where it belongs. Historically, euthanasia talks have always broken down over who gets to pull the trigger. Even the Germans of the 1930s drew the line when Hitler got into euthanasia. Strangers can never decide whose life is worth living, because strangers by definition don't know enough; but neither do friends, because the outside of an illness is so different from the inside. To the eye of Health, any number of conditions may seem quite hopeless: quadriplegia, blindness--how can anyone live with these? Yet on the inside the patient may be bubbling over with ecstasy or rage or despair over something quite unrelated. Happiness seems to proceed on a quite separate track from health, and anyone who's had a major disease has likely had a sense that his loved ones are suffering either much less or much more than himself. Superficially, doctors might seem to combine the best of stranger and friend. Yet even doctors know outsides much better than insides, and have been known to suffer tortures upon hearing that they have a fatal illness themselves, because they know outsides all too well.
If despair is treatable and transient in healthy people, it's often as much so or more in sick ones. Yet there comes a time in some illnesses when both outside and in are filled with nothing but pain and will continue to be until the inevitable end--at which point, someone throughout history nearly always pulls the trigger, legally or not. And the someone has always been the professionals on the spot, the loved ones if possible and whatever is left of the patient, in a consensus of surrender. It isn't cool or precise, but it's the best we can do.
But all this is so far from being news that Rooney talked in the interview of an age-old understanding, "a tacit agreement among doctors" to do just that. And he asked Dr. Kevorkian, "Have you ruined that for them?" To which the doctor answered with stunning and quite startling humility: "I don't think so, but I might have."