Waiting for the End

By Melvin Moddocks

LAST RIGHTS by MARYA MANNES 150 pages. Morrow. $5.95.

Not so long ago, discussion of death was largely a select European import --Camus, say, in The Myth of Sisyphus. Suddenly, death is an exceedingly popular topic in America. It is even an academic specialty: the University of Minnesota boasts a Center for Thanatological Studies, while U.C.L.A. has a Laboratory for the Study of Life-Threatening Behavior. On the lecture circuit, "the subject of death is now outdrawing the perennials--sex and politics," writes Roman Catholic Theologian Daniel C. Maguire in the current issue of the Atlantic. Maguire's essay describes a new genre he calls "the thanatology book."

In one of the recent books in the category, Journalist-Novelist Marya Mannes has explored what may prove to be the most popular approach to death: treating it as a new civil rights issue. More than 40 years ago, Austrian Novelist and Playwright Stefan Zweig wrote: "Among the 'rights of man' there is a right which no one can take away, the right to croak when and where one pleases." This bald manifesto might serve as the banner that Miss Mannes marches under.

In her latest novel, They, Miss Mannes composed a horror-fantasy about a brave new world in which the aging were liquidated in the name of youth cult. In Last Rights she argues for allowing the aging to liquidate themselves, to arrange their own end when they judge death preferable to life. At the conclusion of her essay, Miss Mannes, now in her middle 60s, presents her own legal document of instructions, including the proviso: "I do not wish to survive a stroke that impairs my ability to speak or move, nor any accident or disease resulting in vision too impaired to see or read, or in total deafness. If age and illness deny me these, I choose death."

Confidently, disparagingly, she sketches the obvious alternatives. Should one perpetuate oneself at the tube end of "life-supporting" devices? Obscene. Should one rock out one's days (at $50 per) on the porch of a nursing home? "I'd rather put a bullet through my head."

More acceptable alternatives are hinted at. There is St. Christopher's Hospice in London, where the dying are given "highs" on alcohol and heroin that kill pain and sometimes induce euphoria. There is the Maryland Psychiatric Center at Catonsville, where LSD is used as a kind of rites-of-passage drug, making death less alien while making the last chapter of life more tolerable--or so it is hoped.

Open Dying. But mostly Miss Mannes is pamphleteering for a new attitude toward death. Enough of "hypocrisy." Enough of "evasion." From childhood, death-shy Americans should be taught to confront the corpse: "Look at this face of the aunt you loved. She escaped her body." Honesty is the key --are we doomed to have a book called Open Dying too? At any rate, the best-prepared to die are those who "knew the score right from the beginning and talked of it freely." And so on.

The author's intentions are admirable if unexceptional--"to make human society profoundly humane"--right to the end. But Last Rights is a bad example of what happens when the rhetoric of political liberalism gets transferred to subjects like sex and death, making them programs of ideology. Miss Mannes seems to demand a "good death," a death with "dignity" rather as if she were a union representative asking a corporation president for a decent lunchroom.

Suffering? Evil? Recite no Book of Job to Miss Mannes on the tragic mysteries of life, and mention "God's will" at your own risk. There must be no real losers, even at the end. This seems to be the Utopian dream hidden within the politics of euthanasia.

The ultimate criticism of Last Rights is that it does not do justice to the complexity of death. The author's problem-solving approach deserves credit for compassion, but in its obsession with reducing the pain, it almost succeeds in making death banal.

.Melvin Maddocks

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