To my family, friends, physicians and my lousy, greedy future wife, who may attempt to whack me as soon as the court-settlement check clears:
I hereby request that if something awful happens to me, that I be kept alive. I have a spirit and soul, after all, and want G-d, not anyone else, deciding when it is time for me to check out.
But if I end up on a feeding tube, and my physicians determine that I am in a persistent vegetative state — if I am incapable of making and communicating my own health-care decisions — here is what I want:
Get more opinions! Doctors are often wrong. I have, in fact, been known to show symptoms of a persistent vegetative state following happy hours or a long night at the pub.
Before you do anything, I demand that a young female nurse administer a cold Coke and a Quarter Pounder with cheese, a technique that has successfully restored my cognitive functioning in the past.
But if I remain in a vegetative state, I demand that my mother, not my future wife, be my surrogate. I can understand my wife moving on with her life with another fellow, but it would be insane to allow such a woman to determine whether I live or die.
If my wife goes to court to win back the right to make life-death decisions on my behalf — if she successfully contests my living will and claims I would want to die — I demand that a competent private investigator makes sure she isn't also dating the doctors who keep telling judges I am in a persistent vegetative state.
If the courts side with her — and if they sided with Michael Schiavo, despite numerous conflicts of interests, they very well may — I want the best lawyers in the world to fight the culture-of-death crowd that embraces her.
If we lose in the state courts, I want my case appealed all the way to the top. I want the federal courts to start fresh — I want the same considerations that are routinely given to rapists and murderers, other Americans who have been sentenced to death.
And from the beginning, I want Jesse Jackson at my bedside, using his considerable rhetorical skills to articulate my plight. I want Ralph Nader on my legal team. I want Nat Hentoff, a genuine liberal — he approaches all issues with a broad and open mind in search for truth — articulating my right to live.
It is important that Americans understand what is really going on — that as a disabled person, it is my right to be given due process. That before anyone pulls my feeding tube, the evidence must be clear and convincing that this is what I really want, a consideration Terri Schiavo failed to receive.
I want the ACLU to side with my legal team, not my wife's. This organization claims to be a protector of individual rights, yet it used its influence to strip Terri of hers.
And if my wife is still able to convince the judges, based on hearsay and nothing in writing, that my living will is moot and that I would NOT want to live with a feeding tube, I refuse to die the way Terri did.
I refuse to make it easy on those who sentenced me to my end. No, I want my body to be set on fire, then shot from a rocket launcher over the nation's capital.
While my flaming body soars through the sky, I want every person who looked the other way — the media, the courts, and many allegedly
liberal folks who claim to stand for individual rights — to experience my painful and spectacular death.
Most of all, I want my trajectory to be calculated so that I land in the office of my wife's lawyer, while he or she is meeting with my wife. I
want them both to survive the resulting explosion — both in a persistent vegetative vtate that requires only a feeding tube for them to survive.
And I want their surrogates to be represented in court by the ACLU.
Sincerely,
Tom Purcell
