I am acutely aware of doctors these days. They appear in person. They appear in dreams. They dispense peculiar advice: Buy a big red hat, says one, and it will make you Mexican. Boil three eggs in lipstick oil, says another, and you will become a healthy Australian.
But I am more disposed to listen to the doctor who speaks in English, the language of my pain. Life, he says, is tough.
I am inclined to agree.
I recall my friend Jason at the beach. I was 10 and Jason was 13. He regaled me with stories about his love for the military. All he wanted, he said, was to wear a uniform and wear it proudly. It was 1963, in the summer, and we dove into the Atlantic surf together. For several summers, Jason was my friend and my sure thing. We need sure things. We beg the affection of others. We want to know someone's listening, or being affected.
In 1967, Jason was invited to visit a prestigious military academy. He could hardly conceal his glee and his grandmother called him "the little general." They took him through the appropriate martial paces and he found himself, finally, on a rope obstacle strung between two towers. The cord snapped and Jason fell, breaking his neck.
He could not be revived. He was 17. Life is tough.
I think of Jason's casual misfortune when I try to fathom events in Oklahoma City. There, relatives of the 1995 bombing victims watched on closed-circuit television as Timothy McVeigh, an Army veteran, was etherized into death in Fort Wayne, Indiana.
For some, the process was unsatisfactory.
Shari Sawyer, a witness, called it "too easy."
"He just laid there," she told the Washington Post. "He went to sleep. That was it. Not like my mother, who was on the fourth floor and fell four floors."
"So many people suffered," said her husband, Jay Sawyer. "For him just to go to sleep is just unfair."
He said McVeigh glared at the probing camera, wan but evidently unafraid, as the lethal drugs were administered. "I feel he got the last word," Jay Sawyer said.
Maybe in some ways he did.
There are several dilemmas associated with the death penalty, including its fundamental appropriateness. But the most immediately complex, and compelling, concerns the means of retribution.
If life is truly tough, and murderers are being condemned for taking lives, then death, say some, should be at least as suggestive.
Beheading, hanging, electrocution, firing squad -- each one was culturally expropriated from fantasies of hell. The condemned were forced to anticipate a grisly end, and onlookers were enthralled by its bluntness.
"I saw a man die today," said Oneta Johnson, another Oklahoma City relative. "Quietly, silently, very peacefully, as I've put several animals to sleep, because it was humane. My mother did not get that chance."
And here, I think, is a problem -- an ethically serious one.
If a death penalty is to accurately reflect tough life, one fraught with physical and psychological torments, it must be very cruel indeed. If it cannot be cruel, mitigated by a society's paradoxical wish for humanity, it does not satisfy those who beneath the veneers of justice seek vindication, satisfaction and revenge. The "humane" death penalty -- "going to sleep" -- is a kind of forced euthanasia, which clearly does not play hell's tune.
Which begs a far harder question. If anxiety, not death's blank stare, is life's grimmest shorthand, the part that most depresses and estranges, that most humiliates and levels, why not consider bondage, not termination, as the suffering most likely to elicit remorse -- the remorse from which the Sawyers and Johnson sense McVeigh unfairly escaped?
Life, says my doctor, is tough.
Not death, life.
Christopher P. Winner's e-mail address is cpwinner@praguepost.cz
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