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Show Journey onthe Kiver Styx by L. Kay Gillespie WSC Professor of Sociology [: Greek mythology, the River Styx was the dividing line where access to the other life was established. To journey across was to enter the land of death, but in reality there is no such clearcut line. For me, the journey along this river has been both personal and emotional. I have found visualized both shores yet the perspective from neither side provided me with definitive answers. The journey itself, however, has given me benefit as Ihave become less inclined to make quick decisions or to seek simple solutions to what are extremely complex issues. I have concluded that there can be no objectivity regarding death—at least until each person has come to grips with his own emotions and experiences with death, and it is not possible to know what another person experiences at death. Barbara Graham made this point quite clear as she prepared to enter San Quentin’s apple green gas chamber. The assistant warden explained carefully to her to hold her breath after the cyanide pellets fell into the bucket. When the clouds of fumes were up around her nose, he explained to her, she should then breathe deeply and it would not hurt. Defiantly she looked him in the eye and responded, “How the hell would you know?” The same questions could be asked of us—about living or dying. From a distance we feel strongly that a man should be executed for his crimes. From a distance we favor or oppose issues of abortion and euthanasia. What would happen if that distance were to be lessened? In the next room Arthur Gary Bishop was preparing to die by lethal injection. He had been sentenced to die for the killing and sexual molestation of five young Salt Lake County boys. He was in the “death cell” where he would spend his last 24 hours. One of the members of the Death Watch, those assigned to guard the condemned until his execution, approached and wanted to talk. He told me how he used to be “gungho” in favor of capital punishment, but now after being on the Death Watch he was not so sure anymore. “It would be easier if Bishop were a ‘crud,’ but he is a nice, gentle person. I’m not sure we are doing the right thing by putting him to death. What does it accomplish?” This man had guarded Bishop while he was on death row as an inmate, yet now, watching him in his final hours and seeing him as another human being, his feelings toward the man had changed. During that execution and the previous execution of Pierre Dale Selby I was sought out on several occasions by men who wanted to discuss their changing perspectives on capital punishment as they became — TES involved in the process—as they became more than witnesses from a distance. My own personal odyssey took an unexpected turn when my father, in an aside while visiting a bedridden friend, commented, “I hope someone will leave a bottle of pills by my bed rather than let me linger helplessly in a hospital bed like that.” Dad died suddenly this past summer and there was consolation in knowing that there would be no suffering nor indignity for him in death. However, that first subtle intimation that we, as his family, should agree to help end his life should it become necessary caused me to evaluate the extent to which I would be willing to assist in another person’s death. Would I provide substances or assist in a more passive role? Would there be a time when such a decision would be right for me and would I do it regardless of the consequences? I stood by the bedside as a couple of friends faced the decision of whether or not to continue the life support of their seven-year-old son. He had been electrocuted in their back yard and had been kept “alive” by a life support system in the hospital for seven days. Their eventual decision to disconnect their young son from this web of technology was a trying and emotional one. The respirator was disconnected and his young body ceased to function—it was his eighth birthday. I sat by the hospital bed of an adolescent girl after her fifteenth suicide attempt. She had tried everything from drinking EasyOff oven cleaner, cutting her wrists with her eyeglasses, a toothpaste tube and razor blades to swallowing pins and needles. She was eventually successful after her twenty-third attempt when she swallowed — crushed glass while in a state mental hospital. As director of a girls' school, my approach to suicide attempts had been, “If you really want to kill yourself, I will respect your decision, but if you want to talk, that is what I am here for.” I was never called on that issue—we always talked. But what would I have done if requested to be there while a person took his or her own life? Could I watch, empathize or support another person during the process of suicide? Does that person have the right to end his or her own life and could I respect that right or would I feel bound to impose my own value system, even by force if necessary? Am I able to say that there are no circumstances that would cause me to consider the taking of my own life? Would there be no suffering so great that such thoughts would never cross my mind? And, if they did, how would I expect others q to act towards me? Perhaps the most significant part of my _ journey came through my involvement — with capital punishment and the death — int |