Some people are born with good luck, but I was thirty years old before Lady Luck smiled on me with full radiance. She arrived in the form of a petite bundle of feistiness, inherent smarts, political savviness, personal warmth, playfulness, and all-around beauty named Susan DeMarco.
DeMarco (as she’s called by all who’ve known her) is an admirable example of the virtue of citizen activism. She didn’t dwell in the media limelight, yet she’s one of our country’s dynamic everyday people who consistently make a positive difference in all they do. She’s been a teacher, leader of public-interest groups, investigative journalist, author of three books, government official, public policy innovator, mentor, and lifelong champion of economic fairness, social justice, and equal opportunity for all.
In other words, as one activist put it, “She’s a firecracker.” For some forty-five years, it’s been my good fortune to team up with this woman in assorted progressive/populist battles against the big shots, bastards, and bullshitters who always try to run roughshod over workaday people and our democratic values.
Alas, though, on the first of April, DeMarco slipped away from me and all who loved her. I was alone with her when she drew her last breath, eighteen hours after I asked the hospital to honor her previously written directive that all life-support tubes be removed from her body. Crushingly sad, of course, yet deeply rewarding, for she conquerednot only the blood clot that had slammed into her brain, but also our society’s high-tech medical imperative that she be held captive in her own damaged body.
And how very DeMarco that she managed to “fly away” on the first, which was both Easter Sunday and April Fools’ Day!
Tributes and heartfelt reminiscences have poured in from all over, praising her work and her example. In a letter to me, Ralph Nader wrote, “Your loss is also the people’s loss. Her fight for a just society knew no fatigue, no discouragement. Stamina was her character and relentlessness was her personality.” One longtime Texas friend summed up the New Jersey native with the highest of Texan accolades: “She was mighty fine.”
No need, however, to send flowers or make donations in her name. Rather, she would hope that the comfort of her pain-free passing in an Austin hospital might alert others to consider the possibility of controlling their own end time.
The last message of love that DeMarco sent to all of us is this: Plan ahead. Life comes at us fast, often including an abrupt end to life. She was able to die on her own terms only because she had previously signed three essential legal documents stating her wishes and empowering a trusted loved one (me) to allow medical officials to switch from life-sustaining efforts to palliative care, letting her die naturally and pain free.
The documents are: (1) Durable Power of Attorney, (2) Declaration of Guardian, and (3) Advance Directive to Physicians.
As legalistic as all of that sounds, it’s not complicated to get and fill out standard forms for all three. Indeed, most hospitals today will provide free copies of these forms to anyone who asks. And, a recent Medicare provision pays your own doctor to spend time during your physical exams to tell you about, discuss, and assist you—free of charge—with “Advance Care Planning.”
Oh, one more thing I learned from my Dying-With-DeMarco experience is that it’s not enough to have signed the end-of-life documents—you also need someone who knows where they are when the time comes. Hospital officials cannot take your word that the documents exist. As I frantically searched for them in her “filing system”—i.e., unmarked piles of stuff around her bedroom—I could hear her saying, “Come on, Hightower, time to go!” But, luckily, they were found, and because of that, she was able to depart as she wished.
Above all, DeMarco was a free spirit—full of life, curiosity, and imagination. For example, she delighted in the diversity of birds that populated her big South Austin yard—from shy cardinal couples to raucous grackles—and she often had magical dreams of actually flying with them. She even imagined her final exit as a joyous, avian-like experience—as expressed in an old, uplifting gospel song she liked: “I’ll Fly Away.” And that’s just what she did.
Populist author, public speaker, and radio commentator Jim Hightower writes The Hightower Lowdown, a monthly newsletter chronicling the ongoing ghts by America’s ordinary people against rule by plutocratic elites. Sign up at HightowerLowdown.org.