Basu: Ex-lawmaker Johnston's dying plea to current legislators

Two days before he passed last Friday, I knocked on the door of Dan Johnston’s room at Kavanagh House hospice. A friend, nurse Deb Cosgrove, who was helping care for the trailblazing lawyer, had e-mailed a few days earlier that he was there, and would welcome a visit. “He loves you and Rob,” she wrote.

Even knowing the setting, and the circumstance, I was unprepared for the feeble voice that invited me in, and the sunken-eyed face on the gaunt figure who greeted me. I had known Johnston as a powerhouse, a fearless and outspoken advocate for civil rights and civil liberties, who was sometimes acerbic, sometimes intimidating, but always on the side of the angels. Now he barely had the energy to speak.

“Hi, Dan! How you doing?” I asked breezily, determined not to reveal my shock.

“I’m dying,” he replied matter-of-factly. If I had a problem dealing with it, that was my issue. He wasn’t going to sugarcoat it. He was ready to go. He had Merkel cell carcinoma, a rare but fast-spreading cancer. It was his second bout with skin cancer. Asked what had gotten so intolerable that he just wanted out, he replied simply, “Life.”

To that end, he had stopped eating and was only taking sips of water. But he wished the state of Iowa would have made things easier by allowing his doctor to help speed that process with medication. Physician-assisted suicide is illegal in Iowa. The morphine he was getting was doled out in strictly controlled doses, so he couldn’t even stash that and take it all at once. After all of his campaigns for people's rights, Dan told me, this was the final message to the world: That people should have the legal right to die.

It was uncanny that this would be the topic of our last conversation. It was also my last one with Louise Noun, the friend who first introduced me to Dan Johnston, and who involved both of us in her own right-to-die struggle.

Louise and Dan went way back; both were at the American Civil Liberties Union of Iowa, which two years ago honored him with an award in her name. Dan had lived in New York for many of my years here but he came to Des Moines often. He had written me in my early years at the Register to share insights as a former Polk County attorney and Iowa legislator on issues my columns were advocating for, like civilian review boards for police, and  more effective prosecutions of those who abused their authority. Criminal justice reform was one of his priorities. In fact, there was a picture in his hospice room of him and President Lyndon B. Johnson after the signing of a bail reform bill — "which has been a big disaster," Johnston quipped last week.

Only later did I learn that when he was 30, Dan had argued before the U.S. Supreme Court in support of the rights of Roosevelt High school students to protest the Vietnam War by wearing black armbands. He won that landmark 1969 Tinker vs. Des Moines Independent School District case for the ACLU. In later years, we connected on issues such as gay civil rights, marriage equality and the criminal conviction of a man for transmission of HIV, although it was never actually transmitted. He told me about the great love of his life, the late former legislator Norman Jesse, who had opted to keep their 30-plus year relationship quiet.

But it was Louise Noun’s campaign 14 years ago to legally end her life that moved my connection with Dan into new territory. At 94, she confided to me she wanted to end her life because its quality was fading, but she was having a hard time finding the means to do so. She was committed, however, and wanted me to write about her mission after she died.

I tried to talk her out of it, telling her how valued and important a member of society, and of her friends’ lives, she was and suggesting maybe she was just depressed. She correctly informed me that was selfish thinking because she was ready to go. Intellectually, I understood. But emotionally, I just couldn’t wrap my mind around letting a friend — or anyone — die without trying to stop it.

Dan Johnston was one of the few others with whom Louise shared her plan. But unlike me, he accepted it without judging or trying to intervene. That had puzzled and frustrated me at times, especially when he paid a visit to my office one day to say I should get the column ready because she was going to end her life soon. He didn’t like it that I argued, phoned her and turned up at her apartment hoping somehow to head it off. To me at that time, Dan’s attitude seemed callous.

But the flip side to that callousness was arrogance: Mine. Since I could no more live in Louise Noun’s failing body than I could in Dan’s, I had no business or right trying to convince either of them to stay alive. I had to accept that they knew what they wanted and needed better than I did.

I asked Dan last Wednesday if he was afraid of dying. He said no. He had no belief in life after death, he said. I asked about his family.  “They’re all dead,” he replied.

I told him how grateful I was for his life’s work, and his friendship. He thanked me. I told him I loved him.

As I was leaving, I said, “Maybe I’ll get to stop by again.”

“I hope not,” was his reply.

This time I didn't take it personally. After enough experience with this issue over the years, I have come to support the right of terminally ill and suffering people to end their lives with assistance, once they've consulted with their doctors and have all the information, and are making the decision of their free will. Reluctantly, I've come to accept that it's not my right to play God in anyone's life. Nor is it the state's. But I’m resigned to the likelihood that emotionally, it will never get any easier to accept.