2008 Woodie Awards
Just Write a Will, Will Ya'?
Menachem Wecker
Issue date: 3/29/05 Section: Opinion
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You are going to die. I won't go waving a "The End is Near!" banner near Fenway Park, nor do I preach it from a mildewed wood bench surrounded by empty Budweiser bottles. I am not unduly fatalistic, or at least no one has told me so in the immediate past. But the story of Terri Shiavo bothers me something horrible.
Here is a woman who has been dead for fifteen years. Her vegetative state is one that none of us would care to endure, let alone for fifteen years. So why is she still "alive"? Why is she sitting about in a useless state at the taxpayer's expense?
For answers to tough questions like this, we must always turn to literature for guidance, and this time salvation comes in the person of the brilliant surrealist and absurdist storyteller, Roald Dahl's "William and Mary." You might recognize Dahl as the author of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Danny the Champion of the World, James and the Giant Peach, Kiss Kiss, Matilda, The BFG or the Witches, amongst other stories.
In this particular story, "William and Mary," William Pearl-hardly a rich man-dies, and "and his will was a simple one. With the exception of a few small bequests to relatives, he left all his property to his wife." The will seems a sensible business, but as in every Dahl story, normalcy has no chance whatsoever to last further than a matter of sentences. The solicitor gives Mary Pearl a sealed envelope from her late husband. She expects something "stiff and formal. The man was incapable of acting otherwise," an expectation clearly indicative of a happy marriage of the sort in which Dahl delights. But she asks "Can one refuse to read a letter from the dead?" and presumably answers the negative, for she does read the letter, which turns out to be twenty pages concerning William's Oxford colleague Landy's uncanny discovery of a technique to keep William alive by means of hooking his brain (liberated from the skull) to an artificial heart machine. The brain sits in a basin of cerebrospinal fluid, and in Landy's words, the experiment is "to remove the brain from the skull of a human and keep it alive and functioning as an independent unit for an unlimited period after he is dead."
Here is a woman who has been dead for fifteen years. Her vegetative state is one that none of us would care to endure, let alone for fifteen years. So why is she still "alive"? Why is she sitting about in a useless state at the taxpayer's expense?
For answers to tough questions like this, we must always turn to literature for guidance, and this time salvation comes in the person of the brilliant surrealist and absurdist storyteller, Roald Dahl's "William and Mary." You might recognize Dahl as the author of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Danny the Champion of the World, James and the Giant Peach, Kiss Kiss, Matilda, The BFG or the Witches, amongst other stories.
In this particular story, "William and Mary," William Pearl-hardly a rich man-dies, and "and his will was a simple one. With the exception of a few small bequests to relatives, he left all his property to his wife." The will seems a sensible business, but as in every Dahl story, normalcy has no chance whatsoever to last further than a matter of sentences. The solicitor gives Mary Pearl a sealed envelope from her late husband. She expects something "stiff and formal. The man was incapable of acting otherwise," an expectation clearly indicative of a happy marriage of the sort in which Dahl delights. But she asks "Can one refuse to read a letter from the dead?" and presumably answers the negative, for she does read the letter, which turns out to be twenty pages concerning William's Oxford colleague Landy's uncanny discovery of a technique to keep William alive by means of hooking his brain (liberated from the skull) to an artificial heart machine. The brain sits in a basin of cerebrospinal fluid, and in Landy's words, the experiment is "to remove the brain from the skull of a human and keep it alive and functioning as an independent unit for an unlimited period after he is dead."
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