"Death Magnanimous"

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THE WEEKS AFTER LOUIS Carson’s death dragged, as Charlie alternated between depression and guilt and the memory that he had started this journey to take his own life. He had tried to throw himself out a hospital room window; drown himself in a burn unit cleansing tub; seek a direct hit from an oncoming car (or a train if no car was available); begged his sister to find someone who could do the job right, dragging his sorry ass down to Amarillo, Texas and a law named after a man who cherished the individual right to choose. Charlie spent his abundant alone time watching Dax Cowart documentaries, listening to his speeches before morality-hungry audiences, reading everything he could find online. Confronting Death: Who Chooses, Who Controls? A dialogue between Dax Cowart and Robert Burt Dax’s Case as It Happened: A Chronicle, by Keith Burton Dax’s Case: Essays Burn victim survived hell, still insists on right to die, Christine Wicker and The Dallas Morning News And a big, multi-part series for the Baltimore Sun: Please Let Me Die, by Alice Steinbach, who wrote of “hospital tormentors,” maimed hands, lost vision, and a naked, shivering man lowered into a stainless steel tub brimming with “Clorox-laced” water in pain “that blocks out everything.” Admittedly, Dax’s case was decades ago and everything had changed for the better since then, from treatment options to quality of life. But that wasn’t the point. The point remained: Charlie Chessman wanted to die but only had the right to live. The reading and watching and thinking revived Charlie’s resolve. What was left of the poisoned bourbon, meanwhile, lay in wait in his sock drawer, the subject of a daily vacillation. -- Death Magnanimous, Chapter 32