> Living will is the best revenge
> 
> 
> By ROBERT FRIEDMAN, Perspective Editor
> Published March 27, 2005
> 
> 
> Like many of you, I have been compelled by recent events to prepare a more
> detailed advance directive dealing with end-of-life issues. Here's what mine
> says:
> * In the event I lapse into a persistent vegetative state, I want medical
> authorities to resort to extraordinary means to prolong my hellish
> semiexistence. Fifteen years wouldn't be long enough for me.
> * I want my wife and my parents to compound their misery by engaging in a
> bitter and protracted feud that depletes their emotions and their bank
> accounts.
> * I want my wife to ruin the rest of her life by maintaining an interminable
> vigil at my bedside. I'd be really jealous if she waited less than a decade
> to start dating again or otherwise rebuilding a semblance of a normal life.
> * I want my case to be turned into a circus by losers and crackpots from
> around the country who hope to bring meaning to their empty lives by
> investing the same transient emotion in me that they once reserved for Laci
> Peterson, Chandra Levy and that little girl who got stuck in a well.
> * I want those crackpots to spread vicious lies about my wife.
> * I want to be placed in a hospice where protesters can gather to bring
> further grief and disruption to the lives of dozens of dying patients and
> families whose stories are sadder than my own.
> * I want the people who attach themselves to my case because of their deep
> devotion to the sanctity of life to make death threats against any judges,
> elected officials or health care professionals who disagree with them.
> * I want the medical geniuses and philosopher kings who populate the Florida
> Legislature to ignore me for more than a decade and then turn my case into a
> forum for weeks of politically calculated bloviation.
> * I want total strangers - oily politicians, maudlin news anchors, ersatz
> friars and all other hangers-on - to start calling me "Bobby," as if they
> had known me since childhood.
> * I'm not insisting on this as part of my directive, but it would be nice if
> Congress passed a "Bobby's Law" that applied only to me and ignored the
> medical needs of tens of millions of other Americans without adequate health
> coverage.
> * Even if the "Bobby's Law" idea doesn't work out, I want Congress -
> especially all those self-described conservatives who claim to believe in
> "less government and more freedom" - to trample on the decisions of doctors,
> judges and other experts who actually know something about my case. And I
> want members of Congress to launch into an extended debate that gives them
> another excuse to avoid pesky issues such as national security and the
> economy.
> * In particular, I want House Majority Leader Tom DeLay to use my case as an
> opportunity to divert the country's attention from the mounting political
> and legal troubles stemming from his slimy misbehavior.
> * And I want Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist to make a mockery of his
> Harvard medical degree by misrepresenting the details of my case in ways
> that might give a boost to his 2008 presidential campaign.
> * I want Frist and the rest of the world to judge my medical condition on
> the basis of a snippet of dated and demeaning videotape that should have
> remained private.
> * Because I think I would retain my sense of humor even in a persistent
> vegetative state, I'd want President Bush - the same guy who publicly mocked
> Karla Faye Tucker when signing off on her death warrant as governor of Texas
> - to claim he was intervening in my case because it is always best "to err
> on the side of life."
> * I want the state Department of Children and Families to step in at the
> last moment to take responsibility for my well-being, because nothing bad
> could ever happen to anyone under DCF's care.
> * And because Gov. Jeb Bush is the smartest and most righteous human being
> on the face of the Earth, I want any and all of the aforementioned
> directives to be disregarded if the governor happens to disagree with them.
> If he says he knows what's best for me, I won't be in any position to argue.