Good News, Bad News: No Cure for Death

The news was so good that local TV anchors tried to hide it. Deaths from cancer had dropped for the first time. Just 3%, but a start. This came on top of an announcement that the death rate from cardiovascular disease had dropped more than 23% between 1983 and ’93.

Exciting triumphs of medical science. But like so many solutions, they bring other problems. As comedian Fred Allen once remarked, “Last week medical research came up with another miracle drug. We now have one more cure than disease.”

In helping victims, the scientists seem to have overlooked the price to be paid later by the survivors. For, unfortunately, even when science eliminates all fatal diseases, 100% of us still are going to die. There is no Institute for the Conquest of Mortality.

Since dying is a first-time experience for most of us, the way we exit is unstructured. (Dead again will never be as popular as born again.) Dylan Thomas’ injunction that “old age should burn and rave at the end of the day” was written before the brisk demand for the services of Dr. Kevorkian. Apparently, given a choice, most mortals prefer to leave better than they lived--in a pleasant, painless, trouble-free and cost-efficient way. Expensive suffering is not popular.

Modern cardiology is a case in point. A friend of mine had two heart attacks and a quadruple bypass, but at 76, thanks to science, his cholesterol and blood pressure have never been better. He counts himself among the statistically blessed survivors of heart disease.

There’s his dilemma. He feels that, for people his age, a heart attack is the fatality of choice. It would allow him to go quietly in his sleep or keel over happily on the fourth green. In denying him death by heart attack, research may have kept him alive long enough to succumb ultimately to something much more demanding. It’s a trade-off, but nobody asked his preference.

If you can, imagine a disease-free world. All the ailments that used to take us too early or too painfully are gone. Even though the means to the end have been revoked, mortality still is with us. Unless we venture onto the interstate with faulty brakes, we are reduced to dying of old age.

For too many, that means playing out the third act in nursing homes while their body, memory and senses fade away. Not a popular prospect for most patients, their beleaguered families or the politicians who have to find more money for the Unholy Three--Medicare, Medicaid and Welfare. Only the building industry is happy as nursing home construction begins to equal prison construction. But the prospect of a slow fading away really miffs disciples of Colorado’s ex-Gov. Richard Lamm, who believes seniors owe it to the nation to go quietly, inexpensively and soon.

This presents our much decorated medical research with a new challenge. Find a wholesome substitute for all those miserable diseases it eliminated--a neat, quick, painless terminal condition that will never be cured and is easy for coroners to spell. A civilized finale for those who have played out their dreams. The world is waiting for a happier ending than nursing homes and Dr. Kevorkian.

Since we are talking about an experience common to every registered voter, there should be no trouble getting Congress to fund a whopping research grant for the Foundation for the Discovery of Happy Endings. It’s America’s last frontier.

It’s to die for.