Cancer-Stricken Kevorkian Aide Lives to Fight for the Right to Die

FARMINGTON HILLS, Mich. — Each dawn, 73-year-old Janet Good has to make a decision: Take the pain medication that makes her pancreatic cancer fade to the back of her mind, or stay lucid enough to work.

Though the choice is hard, work usually wins. It wins because through that work, Good helps people she believes are worse off than she is--those looking to die with Dr. Jack Kevorkian’s help.

These days she’s recognized as Kevorkian’s helper, a smiling woman in pink sweatsuits who arranges the rooms and videotapes the proceedings. She was a fixture at Kevorkian’s three trials, and now, with Kevorkian, she faces charges herself related to an August death in Michigan’s Ionia County.

Years before Kevorkian built his first death machine, Good was helping people with terminal diseases commit suicide. Her push for the rights of dying, especially for women, began two decades ago.

For Good, choosing when to die is a new suffrage--a logical step for the women who make up 75% of nursing-home residents over the age of 65.

“Women have been struggling forever to take charge of their bodies,” she says. “Here again was another area where we had no control over our lives. We were at the mercy of whatever the medical profession or some other stranger decided.”

Now, nearly a year after the cancer was expected to kill her, Good has the choice she has fought for. She’s determined that she will not die like her mother did, after 3 1/2 painful years in a nursing home. She finds comfort knowing she will not die without warning, as her daughter did on Christmas Eve a year ago.

She has family members and famous friends who would help her die if she asked. After years of talking about assisted suicide, Good would have no qualms asking.

“My time,” Good says, “obviously is not quite here. I’ve lived longer than the doctors said.

“But I’ve made my decision. I believe I have the right to decide on physician-assisted suicide, and I intend to use that right.”

Until then, she stays busy with her family and with the e-mail and phone calls from people seeking Kevorkian’s help in ending their lives. Good says about 40 are waiting for his help while two prosecutions are pending.

“I told Janet that it didn’t surprise me that she didn’t die yet, because she’s too damn stubborn to die when there’s too much stuff going on,” says J.B. Dixson, a close friend and former co-worker.

Good, a former equal employment opportunity officer for the state of Michigan, has always had something going on. She founded the Michigan chapter of the right-to-die Hemlock Society in 1980, and has been active in the Older Women’s League, the Detroit chapters of the National Organization for Women and the Gray Panthers, and has been a Girl Scout troop leader for 10 years.

Three governors have put her on state boards, and in 1991 she was inducted into the Michigan Women’s Hall of Fame.

“In theory, she worked for me,” says S. Martin Taylor, formerly with the Michigan Employment and Security Commission and now vice president of corporate and public affairs for Detroit Edison.

“I kind of laugh because Janet is a high-power lady who had a strong sense of ethics and morality. Irrespective of office structure, her job with me was to make sure I did the right thing.”

Good says her philosophy came from a childhood full of Catholic charity, which included working with her mother at a soup kitchen.

“Very early in my life I made up an 11th Commandment for me and that is, ‘Thou shall not stand by and watch,’ ” she says. “I heard so many people say, ‘Don’t get involved, don’t get involved,’ and I thought, ‘Something’s wrong with that.’ ”

Good’s first thoughts about assisted suicide began in the winter of 1972, when her mother, then 83, fell off the front porch of her Detroit home and hit her head.

Over the next 3 1/2 years, she slowly died, conscious only enough to tell her daughters she was in pain. Good tried to care for her, but was forced to put her in a nursing home. She watched as bedsores ate away her mother’s back.

She asked the doctors to end her mother’s life. When they refused, she collected a handful of pain pills.

“I had what I thought was a fatal dose,” Good says, tearfully. “And I would go to this home and I’d think, ‘Today is the day that I do this for my mother--put her out of her misery.’

“And I never could do it, and I always felt guilty. I was strong, I do everything. I’m not afraid. Why couldn’t I do this?”

But Good and her mother, a staunch Catholic, had never talked about assisted suicide. And a few years later, Good found out the dose she took to the nursing home would have been too small.

The experience pushed her to find out more about the rights of the dying. In 1980, she joined the Older Women’s League and started the Hemlock Society of Michigan. For her, they went hand in hand.

One of the league’s projects was the rights of nursing-home patients. Good was surprised to find that three-fourths of the residents were women.

“To see these women shackled to a bed, or to be wandering around in a daze, or to hear them crying out in pain, without anyone . . . . They’re just warehouses, orphanages for older people,” she says. “They’re crying out, ‘Please, please end my suffering.’ ”

Good even made a speech to her Older Women’s League chapter about “taking charge of the end of your life.”

The members responded “like I was crazy,” she said.

But by then she was selling books such as “Let Me Die Before I Wake” in plain brown wrappers to Hemlock Society members.

“I had the books, and I have always collected the drugs for people,” she says. “I knew I had three of these and six of these, and I could tell people where to go if they couldn’t get their own.

“I didn’t learn to do this from Dr. Kevorkian. I was doing it, in a different way, before he came along.”

Her activism stood out in a group that consists mostly of older people, says Faye Gersh, executive director of the Hemlock Society USA.

“She stands up and says we should fight and talk and say what we’re thinking,” Gersh says. “We keep waiting for things to happen. When things don’t happen, it takes people like Janet to give things a little boost.”

Dixson, the former co-worker, says she joined whatever group Good happened to be in and saw Good’s resolve change the longer she worked with Hemlock. She remembers one day, sitting on her back porch, talking about how their lives might end.

“Before, it was an abstract civil right,” Dixson says. “But when she began to hear from these people because they were in despair, that made a difference. The abstract civil rights position she had had became a much more passionate, personal commitment.”

In the fall of 1989, Good read about a doctor who had built a machine that ill people could use to commit suicide. Jack Kevorkian fascinated her, she says, because she saw him as putting her ideas into action.

On June 4, 1990, Janet Adkins, an Oregon woman suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, killed herself with Kevorkian’s machine in his rusted van.

Afterward, people trying to reach Kevorkian called the number listed for Hemlock of Michigan--Good’s home telephone.

“The phone wouldn’t stop ringing,” she says. “We had to take it off the hook to sleep at night.”

She started taking messages and calling Kevorkian daily. Soon she was arranging plane tickets and motel rooms. Since Adkins, at least 44 people have died with Kevorkian’s involvement, and Good says she played some role in many of the deaths--either in screening the patients, arranging the travel or simply being there.

She’s pleased that assisted suicide has come out in the open and is broadly discussed.

“And yet Dr. Kevorkian has to go about this cloak-and-dagger exercise to help people out of their suffering,” she says.

“I really wish that doctors would step in and take hold. The doctors have been in charge of dying from the beginning of time. They say who’s dead. They say how they died. They say when they died. Now why don’t they take charge of it now and teach in the medical schools how long you can prolong the dying of any one person?”

How long a person can prolong dying became even more personal in 1995. That August, Good learned she had pancreatic cancer. Doctors told her she had six months to live.

For treatment, she chose a radical 10-hour procedure called Whipple surgery. It involved removing parts of the pancreas, small intestine, gallbladder and bile duct.

Doctors told her family that 1 in 10 patients survive the surgery, and that there was only a 15% chance that her mind would not be damaged.

Good says the “death sentence” and surgery was harder on her family than it was on her. Her daughter, Donna Unger, made a video to celebrate her parents’ 54th wedding anniversary--Christmas Day 1995--expecting that Good would not see her 55th.

Shortly before that Christmas, Good’s husband, Ray, a retired Detroit police officer, had heart bypass surgery, adding to the stress in the family. Good brought her husband home from the hospital on Christmas Eve. Later that evening, as Unger was wrapping presents, she collapsed and died of a heart attack. She was 51.

“It was harder than anything that’s ever happened to me, including getting cancer,” Good says.

The year came and went, but Good kept living. She says her only surprise was that the pain medication took away her mind. She ridicules medical ethicists who say if terminally ill people could control pain, they wouldn’t want assisted suicide.

“The final straw for all the people I have dealt with is when they say my mother, my husband--whatever--has to change my diaper,” she says. “I want to say I am more frightened of being sedated and diapered in a nursing home than I am of dying.

“Being sedated and diapered in a nursing home is not for me, and I do believe I have the right to make that choice.”

After all the years of talking about the choice, she has put off exercising it for now.

“She’s seen a lot of achievements she has done, but she still has a lot of fight left in her,” says Carol Poenisch, a friend of Good who met her at Kevorkian’s trial on assisted-suicide charges in the death of her mother, Merian Frederick.

“She just seems so calm and relaxed in the whole thing.”

Good’s surviving daughter, Marjorie Good, says she sometimes catches herself wishing for the waiting to be over--then realizes what that would mean.

“I think she’s hoping to die in her sleep, but part of her wants to go out with a splash,” Marjorie Good says.

“She’s not depressed or crazy. No one will say she didn’t have a life or family or friends nearby.”

For her part, Good says it would be nice if the cancer just took its course and killed her without help. Or things could stay the way they are indefinitely.

“The only good part about where I am is that I have a choice,” she says.

“If the pain gets so bad that I can’t take care of myself, physically, I can’t go to the bathroom by myself, if Dr. Kevorkian is still around . . . that would be the easiest way.”