Lost at Sea (25 page)

Dave says that Casey and Robin are recovering well. Casey’s had regrets, but now he’s pulling out of it and is glad of his decision again. Susan’s relationships with C in Scotland and Larry in Colorado continue to flourish. She hopes to donate to one or the other of them as soon as she can. Dave hopes to donate within a few weeks, at a hospital in Australia.

He says the hospital in Minneapolis gave Robin and Casey’s address to their two recipients, but neither has written to thank them.

AFTERWORD

Dave McKay hated the story I wrote. He
hated
it. I’d been filming the group for a Channel 4 documentary and the moment Dave read the article he pulled the plug on the filming.

He said he wanted me to think about what I had done.

I didn’t know what he meant. I thought the story was fine. I’d spent about £40,000 of Channel 4’s money, and now Dave had pulled the plug on the filming.

For the next three months or so, Dave consumed my life. He kept saying I had to think about what I’d done. I needed to find a way to continue filming, so I began to suggest things I had possibly done wrong. “Mentioning the whole Anita Foster thing?” I e-mailed to ask.

Dave’s mysterious, cold antipathy turned into rage. He began e-mailing long, furious explanations of what I had done wrong. Scores of e-mails arrived, containing line-by-line analyses of all that was bad about my story.

How I was always looking for cheap laughs or scandal. How I was more insidious than a tabloid cult-buster. At least you knew where you stood with the tabloids. I buried my attacks in clever, sneaky little phrases like “There is a silence.”

The Jesus Christians were saving lives. I was attacking them with nasty sarcasm and underhanded, belittling tactics. Why, Dave asked, did I go on about Casey’s brief regrets when he was recovering from the operation? “A woman in labor probably regrets ever getting pregnant,” he e-mailed.

These e-mails from Dave arrived almost every day for months. I began to wish he would donate both his kidneys. I’d open my in-box each morning with a knot in my stomach. The e-mails read like admonishments from a teacher, like I should feel grateful that even though Dave was at the end of his tether he was still taking the time and trouble to point out my faults to me. He hated the line about the poisoned chalice, and read it out sarcastically in a video message he sent me: “‘I begin to think of the story that has been handed to me as a poisoned chalice. I feel queasy about the decision Susan has to make and I feel queasy about Casey.’ So why did you write the story, Jon? It was your poisoned chalice and you drank from it with gusto.”

No tabloid frenzy ensued as a result of my story appearing, only an article in a local paper called the
Catford News Shopper
.

“
You are only reaping what you have sown,” Dave e-mailed, referring to the trouble I was in now that he’d canceled the filming. “Welcome to the real world. Love, Dave.”

After a few months of this I began to agree with Dave’s criticisms of me.

I agreed especially with his criticism that the line “‘It’s a big deal for the recipients,’ I snap” was intensely annoying, as it was erroneously presenting me as some kind of journalistic knight in shining armor. Eventually Dave and I agreed that if I pledged to publicly apologize in the documentary for what I had written in the
Guardian
,
I would be allowed to continue filming.

“An apology is a GREAT idea!” Dave e-mailed to say.

I met up with Roland, one of the London-based leaders of the Jesus Christians and Susan’s husband. He drafted an impromptu apology for me to read out in the documentary.

“It would be great,” Roland said, “if you could say something like, ‘Hello, I’m Jon Ronson. I really must apologize for my article. I said this . . . Blah blah blah . . . It was wrong. And I guess I’ve been doing it for many years—reading into things or trying to make them more exciting—and in my zeal I misrepresented a few things. And I apologize.’”

“
Many years?”
I thought.

I didn’t say anything. I had been admonished into submission. Roland said he thought Dave was “extremely patient” with me when it came to pointing out my faults. “I was marveling at the amount of time he took over it,” he said.

“It certainly took many e-mails from Dave for me to see the error of my ways,” I said.

“It was worth it,” Roland said.

A month or so earlier, Roland’s wife, Susan, had gone to visit C in Scotland, and I went with her. This was the woman with kidney failure Susan had been corresponding with by e-mail, along with Larry in Aspen.

C turned out to be a young woman called Christine.

“When I first read the e-mail,” Christine told me when Susan was out of earshot, “I thought, ‘Nutter.’ A part of me still thinks there has to be some catch. But as yet I’ve not sussed it out. And maybe there isn’t one. Maybe it’s just my untrusting nature. She doesn’t seem like a crazy, off-her-head person. She seems like a normal, sane person. So she obviously knows what she’s doing. She hasn’t been brainwashed, as far as you can make out. It’s what she believes. And everyone’s entitled to their own beliefs, right? What’s the group called?”

“The Jesus Christians,” I said.

“I’ve not heard of them,” she said.

“They’ve never been that successful,” I said, “because they aren’t the most fun religious cult to be in.”

“It doesn’t sound like it if you have to give a bit of your body away to join,” Christine said, shrugging. We laughed.

Now, Roland told me, Susan had decided to donate her kidney not to Christine but to Larry in Aspen. The decision came to her in a dream. In the dream, she met a sixty-year-old man with gray hair, a little overweight, and he was happy to see her because she was about to give him her kidney. That’s exactly what Larry looked like, which is why she took this dream to be a message from God.

A few weeks passed. Then I received an e-mail from Dave in Australia. He wrote that Christine from Scotland was dying. He said he
could
instruct one of his members to give her a kidney, but if he did I would only accuse him of manipulation. So instead, he wrote, he had decided to let Christine die and let her death be on my conscience.

He posted me a video message. It was him, sitting on a sofa, speaking directly into the camera.

“It’s one thirty in the morning here in Australia,” he said, “and I’ve just received an urgent telephone call from the UK. It seems that Christine in Scotland has had a turn for the worse and I have to make a decision immediately if we’re going to help her at all. At the moment the only person in the community available to help Christine is Reinhart, and he’s booked to fly to India tomorrow morning. The problem with Reinhart is that although he’s willing to donate, he’s not very keen. I could push him into it. I have to make a decision, and there’s a life dependent on it.”

Dave paused. The bags under his eyes practically reached down to the end of his nose. His beard looked stragglier than ever.

“The decision I make,” he said, “is going to have to take into consideration repercussions from the media—people like yourself. As you know, we stopped the filming after your article appeared in the
Guardian
. Among other things, I was upset about the fact that you portrayed me as a manipulator, forcing or coercing Casey into doing something he might later regret. I think that was terribly unfair both to Casey and myself. No way did I push him into doing it. I didn’t even approach him. It was his idea and he ran with it. And that’s why we decided not to cooperate with you. But after this phone call tonight I’ve had a rethink. I’m prepared to go ahead with the documentary, but on one condition: You use this video. You see, I’m not going to say anything to Reinhart. I’ll let him fly out tomorrow. And I’ll let Christine’s blood be on your head, Jon, and on the heads of the authorities there in England, those people who felt that because a group of Christians wanted to donate their kidneys to strangers, there was something wrong with us. So go ahead. Make your documentary. But don’t forget to tell them about the recipients. That’s the big picture, Jon, and that’s been overlooked. These recipients are real people. People like Christine.”

Dave bowed his head and said: “Thank you.”

“You stupid fucking idiot,” I thought.

I’d entered Dave’s world convinced that the cult-busters were the crazy ones, comparing Dave to
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
, etc. But now
I
thought of him that way. Why? Because I really didn’t like him. I began to dislike Dave hugely, in the way that former members of sects hate their former leaders after they rejoin the real world.

Dave had especially hated the implication in my article that he was personally hoping to get out of donating a kidney. And, as it transpired, Dave did indeed donate one, in January 2003, to a man from California.

Susan donated a kidney to Larry from Aspen. I don’t know what happened to Christine from Scotland. Three years later, on April 26, 2006, the Department of Health announced plans to legalize altruistic kidney donations—donations from a stranger to a stranger—as long as they were assured no money was changing hands, and no coercion was taking place.

“I Make It Look Like They Died in Their Sleep”

I
n January 2002 the Irish television news reports that a woman’s body has been found in a rented house in Donnybrook, Dublin. Her name is Rosemary Toole Gilhooly. The police say it was suicide. She’d been suffering from depression. The story would probably have gone unreported were it not for the fact that she’d been spotted at Dublin Airport a day earlier, picking up two jolly-seeming Americans at arrivals. The three of them were then seen drinking Jack Daniel’s and Coke at the Atlantic Coast Hotel in Westport, County Mayo. At one point, other drinkers later testified to the police, Rosemary Toole Gilhooly stood up to go to the toilet and did a jig at the table. The next day she was dead and that night the two mysterious Americans, one dressed as a reverend, left Dublin.

The Irish police release the names of their suspects. They’re seeking the arrest and extradition of the Reverend George Exoo and his partner, Thomas McGurrin, of Beckley, West Virginia, for the crime of assisting a suicide, which, under Irish law, carries a maximum prison sentence of fourteen years.

Radio phone-in shows across Ireland are ablaze with callers supporting Rosemary Toole Gilhooly’s right to kill herself with a reverend at her side if that was what she wanted. I feel the same way. I contact George Exoo to ask if I can follow him around. He agrees.

And so, at dawn on a Monday in 2003, he and I set off in his old Mercedes on a five-hour drive to Baltimore to visit a new prospective client, Pam Acre, who has told him she’s been suffering from chronic fatigue syndrome since the 1970s and is considering killing herself. George is paying for the petrol himself even though he’s broke. He says he asks for donations from his clients but often doesn’t get them, but he doesn’t care because this is his calling.

“I’ve never done anything as important as this in my ministry,” he tells me during the drive. “I think it’s the reason I’m placed on this planet. I’m a midwife to the dying—for those who want to hasten their deaths.”

George is cheerful, giggly, a gay, liberal, libertarian Unitarian preacher. He says he often carries around a large inflatable alligator to his suicides in case the police stop him en route. Should this happen he’ll pretend he’s a children’s entertainer. The alligator will explain the canister of helium in the trunk. Helium is one of his methods.

But lately he’s begun phasing the alligator out.

“It’s been making me feel conspicuous,” he says. “I want to not be noticed. If I’m carrying a big alligator, people are going to notice me.”

“Plus,” I say, “surely the last thing your clients would want to see in the minutes before their death is a large inflatable alligator coming through the door.”

“Exactly,” says George. “Anyway, I’m always careful and I always work quietly, like the Lone Ranger. I do so generally at night and for the most part I make it look like they just died in their sleep. I’ll prop a book up on their lap so it looks like they just expired.”

There’s something Laurel and Hardy–ish about George. Earlier he had demonstrated the helium method for me by attaching a hose to the end of a tank, but he did something wrong and the gas tank practically exploded, shooting the hose across the room and whiplashing his stomach. He shrieked.

“Does this kind of thing happen when you’re helping people kill themselves?” I asked.

“This has never happened before,” George replied, looking sheepish.

Pam lives in a decrepit old country cottage on the outskirts of Baltimore. She looks as crumbling as her house. She’s fifty-nine but looks far older. We sit on her sofa.

“Tell me about your illness,” George asks her.

“This is a difficult disease to cope with,” Pam replies, “because they run all the tests and they come back negative. Then they decide that . . .”

“It’s all in your head,” says George.

“Right,” says Pam.

They smile at each other.

“They start wanting you to go to psychiatrists,” says Pam. “But of course that’s totally useless.”

“Sure,” says George softly. “Sure.”

George says nothing to Pam that might make her reconsider suicide. Instead they talk about the “mechanics of the dying” (what pills and gas and apparatus Pam will need) and she seems delighted to have someone there who isn’t questioning her symptoms or intentions at all. Then she turns to me.

“I’ve learned what I can from this,” she says. “I don’t judge much of anybody for anything. Because until you walk in somebody else’s shoes, you do not know.”

George says he drifted into assisting suicides in the early nineties when he was a Unitarian minister in Pittsburgh. Unitarianism is a middle-class, liberal religion and Pittsburgh is a tough, working-class town, so he had barely any parishioners. He’d look at his tiny congregation and wonder if he was wasting his life.

One day a parishioner approached him and said, “My husband has got ALS [amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a form of motor neuron disease] and your name has been given to me as someone who might help.”

“It was that vague,” George says. “But I knew what she meant. Two weeks later he said to his wife, ‘It’s time. Call George Exoo.’”

That’s how George found his calling. He says he’s assisted 102 people, including Pam, who killed herself, with George at her side, a few months after our visit.

It didn’t go smoothly. “We [George and his partner, Thomas] began chanting the Heart Sutra,” George tells me later, “which we did for half an hour. Then she got up and said she wanted to have a bagel. So she proceeded to get up and toast a bagel. And put cream cheese on it. And sat there munching very slowly on the bagel and proceeded to tell us that this woman who lives in the same house as her was expected to return about eleven-thirty p.m. Well, by then it was eleven-fifteen p.m. Sheesh! And she’s still munching on the bagel. I said, ‘I can’t stay here! I will not leave until I’m finished here but I simply can’t stay here and run the risk of all this audience coming in.’”

“It sounds like she’d changed her mind,” I said.

“No, she was very much decided,” said George. “Very much decided. I was thinking, there was one other time this happened. I was in Pittsburgh. And the woman didn’t follow my instructions. She was sitting around eating stuff in some kind of crazy way, too, I remember. At one point somebody came into the house and I had to hide in the basement. It was horrible. I was scared to death. So I didn’t want to repeat that circumstance. So that’s what happened.” So George left without helping her to die. “She had enough pills to sleep soundly but not enough pills to zap her,” he said.

And then he returned to her house a few nights later, and was more successful.

In early 2004, the Irish police formally instigate extradition proceedings against George. They ask the FBI to arrest him. George telephones me. Can I come to Seattle? He has something he wants to tell me, he says. Something very important.

I meet him in the lobby of a Seattle airport hotel.

“So?” I say. “What’s the news?”

There’s a strange, almost coy smile on his face.

“I’ve ordered a magic potion because I certainly don’t intend to travel to Dublin,” he replies. “So I may be the first right-to-die martyr. Maybe I should call you over to Beckley for the big event.”

“I don’t want to sit there watching you die,” I say.

He looks disappointed.

“Sorry but no way,” I say. “That’s the last thing I want to see.”

George is in Seattle for a private meeting of international right-to-die activists. The biggest names in the movement are here, such as Derek Humphry, a former British
Sunday Times
journalist who wrote a best-selling memoir,
Jean’s Way
, about helping his terminally ill wife commit suicide in 1975.
Jean’s Way
pretty much began the movement: A network of right-to-die groups inspired by it sprang up across the world in the late 1970s. These activists meet once a year in an anonymous hotel somewhere to discuss advances in suicide technologies.

“It’s very hush-hush,” George says. “I’m surprised they’re letting you in.”

The delegates sit around a table in a conference room. George begins by announcing, with a somewhat dramatic flourish, his intention to kill himself rather than face extradition. When he finishes he falls silent and awaits the outpouring of shock and sympathy, or whatever. But there’s none. The other right-to-die activists look unimpressed and unemotional. In fact, they seem much more interested in discovering which method he’s intending to go for. George says liquid Nembutal.

“My curiosity is why would you go with a drug approach?” one delegate asks. The others lean forward, paying attention.

George’s reply is that when one uses helium, the person killing themselves often tries to involuntarily remove the bag once they’re unconscious, and he consequently has to forcibly hold their hands down.

“I don’t want to involve anyone else in my passing,” he says.

He changes the subject. He says Rosemary Toole Gilhooly in Dublin had promised to send him a message from beyond the grave. The message would somehow take the form of roses. And she fulfilled the promise the day after she died.

“What happened was Thomas and I flew out the next morning to Amsterdam,” he says, “and a man brushed by us on the street. He had roses flung over his shoulder. I’ve never seen anybody with so many roses. There must have been ten dozen roses! And Thomas said, ‘There she is! There she is!’”

There’s a silence. Then Dr. Pieter Admiraal, a pioneering Dutch advocate of euthanasia, coughs. “Oh, dear George,” he says. “To meet somebody with roses in the Netherlands is not so extreme, because we are growing them to export to the world.” There’s muted laughter from the others. “And now you are in trouble,” Dr. Admiraal continues. “Maybe God can help you.”

“Maybe so,” snaps George.

That evening I get to talking with Dr. Admiraal about George’s idealism.

“He’s too good for this world,” Admiraal says. Then he adds, “I’ve been observing him for a long time, and I’ve asked our psychiatrists to observe him. He is, in my opinion, enjoying the death of another person. And that’s dangerous. I have the strong impression that he wants to be there and see something dying. Well, he cannot help that. It’s his character. It’s a kind of phobia to enjoy death. And that’s why he says, ‘I will commit suicide.’ Because he will want to die at that moment.”

(Later, Admiraal clarifies this. He says he doesn’t mean George derives psychopathic pleasure from being around death. Instead he thinks George is too in love with the afterlife. He believes in it too much and the pleasure he gets is from clapping and cheering his clients to a better place.)

I’m beginning to feel the same way about George. I’ve noticed that very few of his clients are terminally ill. Most are depressed or suffering from psychosomatic diseases. When I ask him about his client list, he says, “Many of my colleagues will avoid such persons like the plague, but I feel a very strong identity with the story of the Good Samaritan. I stop while others walk by and ignore their pleas.”

How, I wonder, do George and his clients find each other?

After the conference I visit Derek Humphry, author of
Jean’s Way
and the father of the modern right-to-die movement. He’s from Wiltshire but now lives in Oregon, where we sit in his cabin in the forest.

“Once or twice a week,” he tells me, “I get very strange people on the telephone who are anxious to commit suicide because of their depression or sad lives. When they get your number they want to talk and talk. And they call again and again. And they also call all the other right-to-die groups, who say, ‘We can’t help you. It’s not within our parameters because you aren’t terminally ill.’ But they pursue you. They call and call. And eventually someone will say, ‘George Exoo will probably help you.’ And that gets them off the phone and on to George.”

“Isn’t that terrible?” I ask.

“Oh, yes,” he says.

So George is like the backstreet abortionist of the assisted suicide world, getting under-the-counter referrals from the more respectable mainstream.

Three years pass. Even though the Irish government has been pressing the FBI to arrest George, they don’t. Meanwhile he’s traveling around America, helping nonterminally ill people die.

In the spring of 2007 a package arrives at my house. Inside is a videocassette. The postmark on the envelope is Beckley, West Virginia. I close my office door. I put it into the VCR and I press Play.

•   •   •

IT IS AN EMPTY ROOM.
It’s a mess. It’s overflowing with detritus—paperweights, books, novelty ornaments, papers, coffee cups. Then George appears in the shot from behind the camera. He looks like he’s been awake for days.

He says to the camera, to me, “Now. What I’m going to do is call my friend Shirley, who is out in a western state in a motel.”

He picks up the phone and dials. He says, “Hey, Shirley. This is George. The hour has come that we’ve been planning.” He hasn’t bugged the phone, so I can only hear his end of the conversation. “I know you’re nervous,” George says. “You’ve never done this before. But that’s all right. We’re going to get through this. It’s time for you to”—he sighs—“drink the potion that’s in front of you. It’s bitter and horrible-tasting, so it’s important that you chugalug it right down. I ask you to raise that glass and I want you to know how honored I am to be with you at this moment. ”

There’s a silence of perhaps ten seconds. Then George’s voice hardens impatiently: “I know it’s bitter. Just keep drinking. Put your finger over your nose and chugalug it all down.”

He’s talking to Shirley like someone would talk to a child who had disobeyed them. Then he chants a Buddhist chant:
“Gate, Gate, Paragate, Parasamgate . . .”

(Gone. Gone. Gone completely beyond.)

Then: “Shirley? Can you hear me?”

He looks into the camera. “I think I heard the phone drop. Which would mean she is probably now gone.”

He shrugs slightly. “And that’s it. That’s the way it’s done.”

He turns off the camera.

In May 2007 George begins teaching a friend, Cassandra Mae, the ropes. He says he needs an assistant in case he’s arrested or kills himself. I arrange to meet him at Cassandra’s house in North Carolina. I arrive before George. Cassandra lives alone. Her house is filled with plastic lizards. She’s in her forties. While we wait, I ask her how they met.