“You just go ahead and thump on my chest!”

So, she’s 93 and full code.

And, yeah, she has the proverbial multiple medical problems. And, yes, she weighs, what, a hundred pounds, her ribs as much as her lips saying hello. And she’s been in the hospital, what, three, four, five times in the last, what, six, eight months.

But she also knows what she wants.

And what she wants, if her heart stops, if she stops breathing, is for us to do what I have told her we will do: CPR, and likely break her ribs, maybe puncture a lung; shock her heart, if indicated; place a tube in her throat and hook her up to a machine that will breathe for her; that the chances of us bringing her back from the dead are slim, maybe none.

“You just go ahead and thump on my chest,” she tells me with a smile, after I tell her all that.

 And I tell her okay.

Who am I to say to her, that even at 93, she doesn’t deserve this, her own take on the last rites; that, even if, we, in medicine, do what we do, that she is likely to end up in the same place, the same peace.

She is, without question, able to make decisions on her own behalf. And, given that, the fact that she is 93 has no bearing on her decision, no less than on mine, at 61, yours at 75, yours at 40.

Full code, it is.

And you’re thinking, c’mon, dude, the woman is 93, frail, in the hospital now, in the hospital all the time. And Medicare is thinking that she is costing us more than she ever paid in. And others are thinking that she, at 93, needs to know that she is done, has, at 93, nothing more to contribute.

Except, of course, her smile. Her long life. What that life taught her, taught others.

And what I’m thinking is that Thelma has autonomy. That this is her life.

End of story.

Enough Already

We were no doubt due—and to James Holmes overdue—for another massacre.

And James Holmes himself, armed and armored, facing the innocent, the defenseless, got to decide the time, the place, the means, the mayhem of this, their own dark night.

The guns he only recently bought, all legal. So, too, the thousands of rounds of ammunition. And for what?

The slaughter of the dead. The maiming of the wounded. The carnage those left alive at the theater that night only get to relive, tomorrow, and for tomorrows for lives to come.

And for what? For what?

For what, Barack Obama?

Because, lest it cost you only your job, at the expense of your place in history, you lack the courage to say to the country, “No one, apart from the armed forces or law enforcement, in, this, our United States, needs an assault rifle, needs thousands of rounds of ammunition. Not now. Not ever again.”

For what, John Boehner?

Because you, were you to heed reason, would risk disenfranchisement of whom, the unreasonable demanding the same? Risk the loss of what, your own job, even as others continue to sacrifice, not jobs, but lives. For what, a Second Amendment entirely appropriate to its time, what, no fewer than, what, 221 years ago, under circumstances decidedly different than those affecting our lives today. A Second Amendment just that, an amendment, suited to its time, to a constitution, equally suited to its, but an Amendment, nevertheless, and never scripture, never anyone’s gospel.

For what, my friends, who own, who even cherish their guns?

Hunt to heart’s content, but do so using arms appropriate to the task. Most of us unarmed and on the target side of the debate are good with that.

But no one, not even you, my friends, needs an arsenal.

And not one of you, I’m sorry, not a single one of you, has need for weapons intended for battlefields.

As for your Second Amendment rights? All well and good. But what about my children’s right to their lives, to their twenty-something dreams, to their joy, today, every day, as they just go about living, even as they head to a movie, to school, to the mall? Isn’t there a compromise that preserves your rights—and theirs? Spares me, as a father, or some other father, a phone call in some other dark night.

We leave our shoes, we leave our phones, we leave our pennies, even our dignity at airport check-ins.

But we’re leaving our lives—and the lives of those we love, those who love us—at movie theaters, in malls, in the halls of a university or a high school, at a political event, at work.

When, when, when does it all end? And who will be the first to say that it is over?

Let it start here, let it start here with me.

Enough.

Enough, Barack. Enough, John. Enough, everyone.

Enough already.