Todd Brewster & Peter Jennings (11 page)
Read Todd Brewster & Peter Jennings Online
Authors: The Century for Young People: 1961-1999: Changing America
Tags: #History, #United States, #Juvenile Nonfiction, #20th Century, #Historical, #Biography & Autobiography
Opponents of the “right to die” argued that doctors would soon be deciding who lived and who died, giving people a power that rightfully belonged to nature or to God. It was an argument that pitted the control of the individual against the power of fate, the quality of life against the sanctity of life. But while the controversy raged, real people still had to cope with agonizing decisions.
Christina Walker Campi, born in 1951, struggled with the best way to care for her dying husband.
I
n 1996 my husband, Tom, became sick with what we thought was bronchitis. After antibiotics failed, he went through a battery of tests: chest X rays, MRI, CAT scan, bone scan, liver biopsy, ultrasound. It was like Western medicine at its best and its
worst. At the end of it all they diagnosed him with metastasized lung cancer. And what was worse was that it had spread to his trachea and his liver. The next day I got our oncologist [cancer specialist] alone. He said, “What do you want to know?” I said, “I want to know how long he has.” He said, “Six to nine months.” My knees buckled.
For the next several months Tom went through round after round of chemotherapy and treatments, but his cancer continued to spread. The day that I decided to stop treatment on Tom, his most recent MRI showed that the cancer had moved to his brain. He had already started to show some neurological symptoms. He still knew who I was, but he was confused in his thinking. Tom was a brilliant guy who loved to talk, and to see him starting to get confused and losing control of himself was awful. He felt so humiliated. And he was in terrible pain. The cancer had also moved into his bones, which is the most painful cancer of all. I decided to ease his pain with morphine, knowing that this would hasten his death. I knew what I was doing. I was pretty clearheaded at that point. But I'm still tortured by the possibility that he could have had just a short amount of time more, a couple more days. I feel horrible
that I was the one with sole control over this decision.
After Tom and I signed the DNR [do not resuscitate] order, he was moved to a private room and he was put on a morphine drip. After he was on the morphine for a while, a friend of mine, who happened to be a doctor on staff at the hospital, came by and said, “You know, he's not going to last more than a couple of hours right now.” And I started to cry, because his children were on their way in from California to say good-bye, and I was afraid he would die before they got there. My friend told me to have them turn the morphine pump off, and then he'd come out of it for a little while. He woke up the next morning, and he saw his kids, and he kissed them, he hugged them. He kind of squeezed my hand a little bit, and he went back to sleep. And that was it; he never woke up again. Luckily, because I had them decrease the dosage, he was able to hold on to see his kids. But I had no guidance, no help on this at all except that I happened to have this friend who's on staff there. He would've died that night and not seen his kids had we not turned the morphine pump off.
We had been helped by the doctors with all sorts of treatment, but their help pretty
much stopped when the treatment stopped. These were good doctors, with whom my husband was very attached, but they were trained to prolong life, not to deal with the dying process. I was left with this enormous feeling of having been abandoned.
This experience made me realize that birth and death are equally important, but we only pay attention to the birth end of it. Whenever you read anything about death or dying, you inevitably read about Dr. Kevorkian and about physician-assisted suicide. That is just a red herring in the whole discussion of death and dying. It has little to do with ordinary illness and dying. Death is like our dirty little secret. We all come to this world, but we pretend we are all not going to go out of it.
I think Americans especially are terrified of death. We're a can-do population, so death seems like a terrible failure to us. We assign blame rather than see death for what it is, which is the way it's going to end for all of us.
When England's Princess Diana died in a car crash in 1997, the new communications technology spread the news across the globe instantly. Although she and Prince Charles were divorced and Diana never would have been queen, she was
known everywhere, and her death caused an enormous outpouring of grief. On the day of her funeral, more than a million people lined the streets of London to watch the coffin pass by. Billions more watched on television. Why did so many people mourn her passing? Diana was beautiful and charming, and she had supported many charities. But her connection to people seemed to go deeper than her outward accomplishments. People felt more loyalty to her than to the royal family she had married into. She was the “people's princess,” and the sad story of youth and beauty and promise so tragically cut short moved people around the world to tears.
The funeral of Princess Diana could be seen as a bookend for the century, matching the grand funeral of England's Queen Victoria in 1901, which marked the passing of the 1800s. Life has changed more in the hundred years since Queen Victoria's death than it did in the thousand years that went before. And most of the changes the twentieth century brought were for the better. Think about this: The life expectancy of an American born in 1905 was only forty-nine years; by 1998 it was seventy-six years. Think, too, about the fact that in the late 1800s every other death was that of a baby. And remember how many people at the beginning of the century lived not only without electricity or telephones or TVs or computers, but also without the basic freedoms that democracy now gives them.
It is true that the world completely failed to realize the fantasies of a golden age that many people dreamed of at the start of the twentieth century. Even the sophisticated streets of the new “global community” are still the scene of violence and bloodshed. In the twentieth century people believed that human will could control the forces of existence through science and technology. Yet at the end of the century a new humility seemed to be growing, a sense that there are limits to what people can control.
There is still no communications tool more powerful than the family story, and the family stories handed down from this century have all too often been tales of oppression, of prejudice, of war, of sorrow. In every family's history are ancestors who survived the terror of World War I, the horrors of the Holocaust, the injustices of the Jim Crow laws, or the grim grip of Communism. Both politics and technology made the twentieth century a century of killing. But politics and technology also provide us with hope for the future. And it is hope that carries us forward into the unknown territory we will explore in the next century.
Read more about our nation's history
in these companion volumesâ¦.
for Young People
Becoming Modern America 1901â1936
Imagine â¦
watching the Wright brothers rise into the sky,
demonstrating for women's right to vote,
fighting in the trenches during World War I,
hearing the first voice crackle over the radio,
riding the rails as a hobo during the Great Depression.
Let your imagination soar as you experience all the
drama of the twentieth century through the eyes of the
people who lived it. The vivid stories of the
eyewitnesses at the center of this narrative bring to life
the most inspiring, surprising, and terrifying events of the
past hundred years. These are the voices of the
ordinary peopleâwoman and men, children and
adultsâwho were a part of history in the making. Their
joys and sorrows, hopes and fears provide a compelling
insider's look at the momentous events that have
reshaped the world and transformed the everyday lives of all
of us in a century of incredible changes.
for Young People
Defining America 1936â1961
Imagine â¦
landing in a hail of bullets on a Normandy beach,
being blacklisted as a Communist and pressured to
betray your friends and coworkers,
watching the first images spring to life on television,
walking eight miles in the rain to demand equal rights.
Let your imagination soar as you experience all the
drama of the twentieth century through the eyes of the
people who lived it. The vivid stories of the
eyewitnesses at the center of this narrative bring to life
the most inspiring, surprising, and terrifying events of
the past hundred years. These are the voices of the
ordinary peopleâwoman and men, children and
adultsâwho were a part of history in the making. Their
joys and sorrows, hopes and fears provide a compelling
insider's look at the momentous events that have
reshaped the world and transformed the everyday lives
of all of us in a century of incredible changes.
Text copyright © 1999 by ABC, Inc.
New introduction copyright © 2009 by Brewster, Inc.
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children's Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
Delacorte Press is a registered trademark and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
This is the third volume of a three-volume adaptation of
The Century for
Young People
, by Peter Jennings and Todd Brewster. Based upon the work
The Century
, by Peter Jennings and Todd Brewster, published by Doubleday Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 1998.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Armstrong, Jennifer.
The century for young people / Peter Jennings, Todd Brewster; adapted by Jennifer Armstrong. â 1st trade pbk. ed.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-375-89397-1
1. History, Modernâ20th centuryâJuvenile literature. 2. History, Modernâ20th centuryâPictorial works. I. Jennings, Peter, 1938â2005. Century. II. Brewster, Todd. Century.
III. Title.
D422.A76 2009
909.82âdc22
2009008437
Random House Children's Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.
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