I’m a fan of mystery stories, going back a very long way. I remember as a kid sitting in my grandparents’ home reading Grampa’s collection—he had an omnibus edition of Sherlock Holmes, scads of Agatha Christie novels, and probably everything Erle Stanley Gardner and Rex Stout ever wrote. He also had this big blue-dust-jacketed book of true crime stories—it seems to me it might have been a Reader’s Digest book; in retrospect, I’m not sure a child as young as I was should have known who Sam Sheppard was, but at least I turned out OK. (Mostly. I think.)
Anyway, when it comes to reading mysteries, I tend to prefer the Great Detective sort of stories, authors like Christie, Dorothy Sayers, P. D. James, G. K. Chesterton, and (to name someone a bit more obscure these days) Melville Davisson Post; but on TV, I enjoy the current ascendancy of police procedurals quite a bit. (Though I would say that in my book, the CSI series are really more akin to R. Austin Freeman’s Dr. Thorndyke stories than to the classic procedural.) One of my favorites—though I don’t think it’s lived up to the promise of its first season—is Cold Case, in part because the show’s premise allows them to move throughout history, and in part because of a superb cast and generally good writing.
That said, I wasn’t all that pleased with last Sunday’s episode, “The Good Death.” It was an agenda episode, pretty much intended as a commercial for euthanasia, and that posed two problems for me. First, it was pretty unsubtle about its agenda; I don’t mind if a story tries to make a point, but I dislike being bludgeoned, even if I agree with the message. Second, in this case, I don’t agree with the message, since I consider euthanasia a barbaric and anti-human practice, even if many who support it do so out of compassionate motives.
In this particular instance, I especially disliked the episode’s subtext, which is that we should allow euthanasia because hospitals just let patients suffer. As a former hospital chaplain, that blindingly white TV hospital with nary a caregiver in sight (except for the nurse who’d been arrested for euthanizing patients, and the doctor whose only function was to give the diagnosis) doesn’t look anything like any of the hospitals I know. In point of fact, the depiction was a shameful libel on our nation’s caregivers. I don’t say all hospitals are perfect, and I would imagine there are those out there that do fall down on the job, but by and large, the doctors and nurses in this country put a great deal of effort into caring for their patients—and in cases of extreme pain, that doesn’t merely include pain control, it begins with it. Clearly, the writers of this episode know little or nothing about hospice care and comfort care—either that or they suppressed what they know in order to make the case for their agenda seem stronger.
The funny thing is, though, that they actually did a pretty good job of defeating their own argument—which is perhaps evidence of the grace of God working its way through the cracks in human intentions. There was, for instance, the closing song (Paul Westerberg’s “Good Day”), which declares, “A good day is any day that you’re alive”—a remarkable affirmation of the value of life in itself to conclude an episode which tried very hard to make a very different point. More significantly, though, the entire structure of the episode undermined its argument. The case for euthanasia rests, philosophically, on the assumption that suffering is an unmitigated evil, unrelievedly bad. Given that, if you aren’t going to be able to live without significant suffering, life isn’t worth living, and you should be allowed to kill yourself—or someone should be allowed to kill you. And yet, over the course of this episode, we were shown a very different reality, as the suffering of the deceased protagonist (whose death Lily Rush and the rest were investigating) proved in fact to be powerfully redemptive. The pain and other effects of a severe brain tumor transformed one of the most selfish and unpleasant characters I’ve ever run across—well, not to put too fine a point on it, back into a human being—bringing him to the point of reconciling with several people he’d hurt, most notably his wife.
It’s not too much to say, looking at this episode, that the cancer was the best thing that ever happened to this guy. His suffering was redemptive; his life was better for the pain he had endured; and yet, from the perspective of the episode, better to kill him (at his request, it must be noted) than to let him suffer any longer. Never mind that had he lived, he might have fully reconciled with his son, thereby allowing the son to heal much sooner from the damage his father had done him through their lives; never mind any of that. Pain hurts, hurting is bad, anything is justified to end it. Except that in that case, wouldn’t it have been better if he’d never gotten sick?
