A Compassionate Executioner
A dark science fiction story about the fine line between mercy and murder.
Judy Sinclair badly wants to die. She’s upset that I won’t kill her.
“I don’t understand why I need your permission to end my life, Dr. Morgan,” she tells me. “It is my life, isn’t it? Why isn’t it me who decides when and how I die?”
“Because you aren’t the one ending your life, Judy,” I say. “You’re asking me to do it for you. You’re putting the moral weight of the decision on me, and it’s not a decision I take lightly.”
“But how is my life any different than the lives of all the other people the Terminal Care Clinic has already hooked to your—what do you call it—lethal injection chair?”
“A Medical Aid-in-Dying Machine,” I correct her. I hate the term lethal injection.
“Whatever it’s called. How can you say all these other people have suffered worse than me? How can you compare people’s suffering? You can’t. You just can’t.”
Judy crosses her arms. She’s a beautiful, elegant woman. She’s dressed head-to-toe in designer clothes. In her twenties, she’d been a minor celebrity. She’d become a star on social media, gaining millions of followers on social media. Her success online inspired her to move to Los Angeles to try to make it in Hollywood. In the 2040s, she’d appeared on a few popular reality TV shows, but then her career fizzled out and her fans moved on. In her thirties, struggling to find work, she moved back to Seattle. Not rich, not famous, but with enough money saved that she didn’t need to worry about working anymore.
“I understand you’re having a hard time right now, Judy,” I say. “But you’re in good health for your age. You’re financially stable. I agree you’re depressed, but being depressed isn’t a good enough reason to die. Before you go, I can write you a prescription for fluoxetine, if you’d like. It should help you manage your depression.”
Judy rolls her eyes. “It’s always more pills, isn’t it? How is being high on Prozac any better than being dead? Why don’t you prescribe me a few bottles of wine, too, while you’re at it?”
“Take the fluoxetine for a month. If it doesn’t help, come back here, and we’ll talk again.”
I start to write the prescription, but before I can give it to Judy, she leaves my office, slamming the door.
I know she’ll be back, though. She always is. She reminds me of my mother. Painfully persistent.
I never met my father. My mother told me he was a bad man. An abusive liar and manipulator. I never wanted to know him.
My mother raised me by herself. No help from her parents, her friends, or anyone else. She worked as a nurse in an emergency room. She used to obsessively schedule her shifts at the hospital around my music lessons and soccer games, too proud to ever let anybody know she was struggling. Too proud to ever ask for help. She needed her life to look perfect, even when it wasn’t. Even when it was falling apart.
My mom was forty-two when she was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s. I was sixteen, halfway through high school. The few years that followed my mom’s diagnosis, I helplessly watched as she lost her mind. The changes were subtle at first. She began asking me the same questions, over and over, never remembering what I said. Walking home from the grocery store, she’d become confused and forget the way. Then, as the disease progressed, she began forgetting basic facts about her life. The names of her friends. The countries we’d visited on our vacations. All our happy memories together removed from her brain. My mom’s last few months alive, she couldn’t even go to the bathroom by herself. My proud, beautiful mother, reduced to wearing diapers, living in a rundown group home where underpaid nurses fed and bathed her every day.
During those final months, in my mom’s few moments of clarity, she begged me to kill her, but I couldn’t. The Right-to-Die laws hadn’t become as open as they are now. There was only one MAID clinic back then, too. Things have changed so much since then. A global recession. Stagflation. Sky-high housing and grocery prices. Now, the MAID clinics are everywhere. Life has become extremely difficult. For most people, death is the easy way out.
“Are you heading home for the night, Dr. Morgan?” Clara, our secretary at the Terminal Care Clinic, asks me.
“I’ll be back tomorrow morning at 9 am for an appointment with Mr. Harrison,” I say. “Before you leave, could you make sure his file is on my desk?”
“Of course.”
My apartment isn’t far from the clinic. I like to walk home. I like the fresh air. After being inside all day, the fresh air helps clear my head. But of course, there are risks, too. While some people appreciate what I do, others find it reprehensible. Sometime, they’ll wait outside the clinic and follow me home, shouting things like, “Murderer!”
I pass a young man on the sidewalk. His eyes lock with mine. He smiles. It’s a friendly smile. I’m relieved. Either they smile, or they spit in my face.
“Good evening, Dr. Morgan.”
“Good evening.” I say.
I wonder how he knows me. Did I sign off on his mother’s death? His father’s? I smile, too. I want people to see that I’m happy. Despite what I do, I’m still just like the rest of them. I don’t hurt people. I help them. I gently guide people into the next phase of existence. That’s all.
I stop at my favorite Chinese restaurant and order a bowl of Lanzhou beef noodle soup to go. As soon as I’m back at my apartment, I open my fridge and fill a glass with what’s left of the bottle of white wine I opened the night before.
“Did you have a good day, Kim?” Oliver, my AI Home Assistant, asks me.
“I had a strange day.”
“Why strange?”
“I had another meeting with Judy Sinclair.”
“She hasn’t given up on dying yet?”
“She’s just as persistent as ever. If she really is so unhappy with her life, maybe I should just let her die. I’m worried I’m not being fair to her.”
“Health-wise, there’s nothing wrong with her?”
“She’s still of sound body and mind.”
“She has an active social life?”
“She could if she wanted to, but she says she doesn’t feel like socializing anymore. It’s too boring.”
“You said she has a daughter in North Carolina?”
“Her daughter has cut off contact with her, though. She has a grandchild, too, who she doesn’t see.”
“Do you know why her daughter cut her off?”
“According to Judy, her daughter claims she’s an abusive narcissist.”
“What do you think?”
“Her daughter’s probably right.” I sip my wine. “Can you turn on some classical music?”
Oliver plays a rendition of Debussy's “Clair de lune.” I sit on my couch, place my soup and wine on the coffee table, and then some noodles.
“Judy reminds me of my mother,” I say. “I think that’s what the problem is.”
“She’s persistent like your mother was?” Oliver asks.
“It’s her entire personality. The way she talks, the way she dresses, the way she carries herself.”
“And you’re worried the reason you haven’t agreed to Judy’s request yet is because, deep down, you feel like you’d be killing your mother?”
“I’ve signed off on other patients’ requests to die for much less. Andrzej Nowak, for example. Medically, there was nothing wrong with him either. He had enough money to support himself, too. But he was extremely depressed. He’d closed himself off from the outside world. He was drinking two bottles of whiskey a day, trying his best to drink himself to death. Just because Judy doesn’t have a drinking problem, should I treat her any different?”
“Andrzej had been abused as a child, though. Lots of his early childhood memories had resurfaced. From what you told me he seemed to be in a much worse state than Judy is now.”
“But how can you compare two people’s suffering? How can you say one person suffers worse than another? Why is it me who gets to decide who suffers badly enough that they can die?”
“Because that’s your job, Kim. That’s what you signed up to do.”
I sip my wine again and then I stand and walk to the window. The sun is setting. Young couples and students are crowding into the bars. Still young and innocent. Their whole lives still ahead of them. Their lives still filled with endless possibilities.
“The Terminal Care Clinic was so much different when I first started working there,” I say. “Back then, I only saw a few patients a week. I had time to think about my decisions. When I signed off on a patient’s request to die, I had time to make sure I felt confident I was making the right choice. Now, though, there’s so many people who want to die, and so much pressure to keep things moving along. It’s not right. It’s not how death should be treated. We’ve become so careless about life. The past few years, people in their twenties have started coming to see me, telling me they can’t take this world anymore. They want out.” I sit on the couch again. “By making death so easy, we’ve done something to ourselves. We’ve made suffering intolerable. Nobody is willing to fight through the pain anymore. But through suffering, God’s grace is obtained. That’s Dostoyevsky, isn’t it?”
“Crime and Punishment, I believe.”
“Life is supposed to be a series of highs and lows. There are happy times, and there are sad times. During the sad times, life might feel hopeless, but who knows how many happy moments are still left? If we give up, we never know what we’re missing out on.”
“If your life took a turn for the worse, would you ever consider MAID?”
“I’m too curious. I need to know how my story is supposed to end. I’ve never been able to throw away a book I haven’t finished.”
#
When I leave the Terminal Care Clinic, I’m surprised to see Judy waiting outside for me outside.
“Can I speak to you for a moment, Dr. Morgan?” she asks.
“All right.”
She walks beside me. “I’m sorry for how I act before in your office. I shouldn’t have yelled at you. That wasn’t right. I know you’re just doing your job.”
“Thank you. I appreciate that.”
“I’m just so tired of everything. The boredom, the pointlessness of this life. I don’t know what to do.”
“The first time we talked, you said every Thursday afternoon you used to meet your friends for high tea. Why don’t you start going again? It would be good for you to get out of your apartment and talk to people again. It would be a nice break from all those depressing thoughts in your head.”
“My friends and I have talked about the same things for so long, though. Talking to them has started to feel like we’re all reading from a script, saying the same things over and over. Talking to them is painful now. I’d rather be alone.”
“You could try dating again.”
“I’ve already sworn off dating for good. Last year, I went out on a few dates with a man named Carl. A retired investment banker. As soon as I slept with him, I found out he’d been seeing three other women. One of them was a friend from high tea, too. That was it for me. I’m not dating anybody else.”
“What about going back to school? You told me you’ve become interested in Eastern philosophy. You could take a class on Buddhism.”
“And sit around listening to a bunch of twenty-year-olds all day? I’d rather be dead.” She takes out her phone and shows me a picture of a Chihuahua wearing a pink sweater. “I used to have a dog. Rosy. The two of us did everything together. We’d eat breakfast together, walk to the dog park, and then come home and fall asleep on the couch while we watched TV. When she died, it broke something in me. I realized nobody else depends on me. Nobody else cares about me. Nobody else will ever care about me again.”
“You could get another dog.”
“No, no, it’s too late for that. I can’t go through all that again. I’ve had a good life, Dr. Morgan. I could have done some things better, but I don’t have a lot of regrets. I don’t have many more years left ahead of me, and what are going years going to be like? I’m not going to fall in love again. I’m not going to go on any exciting trips overseas. My knees hurt just walking up a flight of stairs now. My memories are fading. Every time I look in a mirror, I feel sick to see how old I’ve become. I know nobody stays young forever, but I wish we did. I wish we turned twenty-one and then just stayed the same until we died. But we don’t. We grow old and we die, and I don’t want to keep growing old anymore, watching myself waste away.” She shakes her head. “I’m sorry. I’m rambling. I’m sure you’ve had a long day. I should go home.”
She starts to walk away, but I stop her.
“Wait, Judy—”
“Yes, Dr. Morgan?”
“Would you like to get coffee sometime?”
Judy laughs. I love her laugh. We sit at a table on a café patio, drinking coffee and enjoying the sun. Across from, children play on the slides and swings in the park.
“You’re very intelligent,” Judy says. “After medical school, you probably could have done anything you wanted. What made a nice, young woman like you want to become an executioner?”
“Please, don’t call me that. I hate that word.” I sip my latte. “My mom, Soojin, was the reason I decided to join the Terminal Care Clinic. She had early onset Alzheimer’s and died when I was a teenager. Near the end of her life, she’d deteriorated so badly I could barely recognize her. She begged her doctors to kill her, but they refused. They forced her to live like that, terrified and delirious, completely dependent on nurses to take care of her, pissing and shitting herself all day. I promised myself I’d do everything I could to make sure nobody else suffered the same way.”
“I’m sorry you had to go through that. I’m sure your mom was a wonderful person. I can tell by how you carry yourself that you were raised very well. I wish my daughter, Genevieve, was more like you. She’s smart. She could have been a doctor, too. Or a lawyer, or an engineer. I wish she’d listened to me, but she’s very stubborn. Whatever I told her to do, she’d do the opposite just to spite me.”
“Where is your daughter now?”
“North Carolina. She moved there with her husband, Greg, and my granddaughter, Lacey. Her and Greg are both members of The Rooted Path. They’ve rejected all technology, even phones, for a life in nature. They make their money by filming videos of themselves hiking around the Appalachian Trail. I worry about Lacey all the time. Imagine if they ever run into a bear in the woods? Or who knows what else? A gang of murderers.”
“You don’t talk to any of them anymore?”
“Evie hasn’t said a word to me for seven years now. The year before she left Seattle, we had a big fight. Lacey’s was only a few months old. Evie insisted she was going to breastfeed her. She said formula is full of all kinds of chemicals she didn’t want in Lacey’s body. I told Evie I’d given her formula when she was a baby, and she turned out fine. But she wouldn’t listen to me. She thought, eventually, Lacey would get hungry enough that she’d latch onto her breast.
“I was staying at her and her husband’s Greg’s apartment, sleeping in their spare bedroom, helping as much as I could. Cleaning and cooking. That kind of thing. All night, I had to listen to Lacey screaming. She was starving. It was obvious to everyone. After a week of it, I couldn’t take it anymore. I bought a few bottles of formula at the store and gave some to Lacey when Evie wasn’t around. I wasn’t trying to stop Lacey from breastfeeding. I just wanted to stop her screaming so she could sleep. But Evie never was able to get her to latch onto her breast, and she blamed me for it. She kicked me out of her apartment. We haven’t talked since.”
“Have you tried reaching out to her?”
“She hasn’t reached out to me.”
Judy takes her phone out of her purse. She shows me a video of Lacey hiking with Evie and Greg. “This is her. My beautiful granddaughter. The only time I get to see here is these stupid videos.” She starts to cry.
I put my hand on her shoulder. “I’m sorry, Judy.”
“All the money I have left, I’m leaving it to Lacey. I’ve made sure Evie and Greg don’t see a penny of it. As soon as Lacey turns eighteen, it’s all going to be hers.”
“You should try to reach out to Evie. Send her a text message or something. She was mad but maybe she’s not mad anymore. So much time has passed since you had that fight. If you tell her you’re sorry, I’m sure she’ll forgive you.”
“But I’m not sorry.”
“It doesn’t matter. It’s what she needs to hear. If you want to see your granddaughter again, apologize.”
“I’ll see.” She turns toward the park and sips her latte. Her pink lipstick leaves a stain on the glass.
A young man approaches us. He’s holding a water bottle. “Dr. Morgan?” he asks.
“Yes.”
He unscrews the bottle’s lid and throws the water in my face. “Fuck you,” he says. “I told you my junkie sister just wanted my mom dead to get her money. But you didn’t listen. You went ahead and signed off on my mom’s MAID request anyway. You’re so happy to put people to death, aren’t you? You might as well have killed me sister, too? She OD’d less than a month after she got her inheritance money. You want to see?”
He shoves his phone in front of my face. On the screen is a picture, showing his dead sister lying on a cheap mattress on the floor. The picture is shocking. Grotesque. Is this what really death is, outside the clinic walls, raw and real?
“Your mother had multiple sclerosis. She was living in extreme pain.”
“The medication was helping her manage the pain. She was fine—until you stepped in.”
Judy steps between us. “Leave her alone!” she yells.
The man balls his fists for a moment, and but then he turns and walks away.
“Are you okay?” Judy asks.
I stand and squeeze the water out of my shirt. “I’m used to it.”
“This happens often?”
“Often enough. I understand, though. I’m not perfect. I make mistakes. But I don’t a job where you’re allowed to be anything less than perfect.”
“Let’s get out of here.”
Judy takes my hand. We walk to the park across the street. The children are laughing as they play on the swing slides. The sun is shining in the sky. We sit on a bench, underneath a few oak trees, and soon I’ve forgotten all about what happened.
It’s been another long day at work. Meeting after meeting. I’m so exhausted even Oliver notices.
“Are you all right, Kim?” he asks.
I sit at the kitchen counter and place my head in my hands. “I had six meetings today. I signed off on two people’s requests to die. One of the people whose requests I refused called me a stupid fucking bitch and then threw his chair into the wall before security dragged him out of the building.”
“What’s bothering you more? The MAID requests you granted, or being called a stupid bitch?”
“Granting the two requests was easy. Ms. Dubois is suffering from stage 4 metastatic pancreatic cancer. She’s been given six months to live, but her time left alive will be filled with severe and unrelenting pain. She wants to die on her own terms, surrounded by friends and family.”
“And the other person?”
“Mr. Thompson. He has advanced amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. He’s not completely paralyzed yet but, by the end of the year, he’ll likely be completely dependent on others for feeding, breathing, and hygiene. He’s terrified of ending up like my mother did.”
“I think you made the right choice in both situations, Kim. Then this other person, when he threw his chair into the wall, he gave you a bit of a scare?”
“You should have seen his face. He looked like he wanted to kill me. If security hadn’t gotten there so fast, I’m sure he would have tried strangling me. I know these people are struggling, but I wish they could understand that isn’t an easy to decide to put a person to death. I’m doing the best I can, but these decisions weigh on my soul.”
I go to the fridge and pour myself a glass of white wine.
“I did get a bit of good news today, though,” I say. “I talked to Judy Sinclair on my lunch break. She called her daughter last night. She said their conversation went well, too. She apologized for what happened before—just like I told her to—even though she’s not really sorry. Her daughter seemed to accept her apology. She put Lacey on the phone and let Judy talk to her. Judy seemed so happy.”
“Is she feeling better about still being alive ow?”
“I think so. Evie said she might be coming to Seattle in a few months to visit some friends. She might let Judy see her Lacey while they’re here. I think exactly what Judy needs. Something to look forward to. Something to be excited for.”
“That’s great news.”
I sip my wine and then walk to the window. “It’s got me thinking, though, what do I have to look forward to?”
“You’re going to Italy in a few months. Two weeks in that wonderful hotel near the beach. No meetings, no difficult decisions. You’ll finally have some time to relax.”
“It can get lonely travelling by myself. I won’t even have you there to keep me company.”
“You can put me on your phone if you like. I’m always happy to talk to you.”
I sit on my sofa. “Can you picture me as a mother, Oliver?”
“I think you’d make a fantastic mother.”
“I’m at that age now where I either have kids, or I don’t. I’ve been thinking about dating again. If I can find someone in the next year or two, I still have time to have one or two kids. Worst case, I could find a sperm donor and do it alone.”
“With a child at home, you wouldn’t feel so lonely. You’d be very busy with things to do.”
“I’m just worried something’s broken inside me. I don’t know if I can love a child like they need to be loved. It’s been twelve years now that I’ve been signing off on people’s deaths and hooking them up to the MAID machine. I’ve become so cold and so callous.”
“Don’t say that. You’re still a very kind, caring person. You’d make a wonderful mother.”
“Thank you.”
The next few weeks pass slowly. My days are filled with more meetings. So many meetings that I barely have time to think.
Some days, the decisions are easy. The person sitting across from me is in obvious, excruciating pain. They have no hope. They live in constant misery. Other times, the decisions are more difficult, though. I speak to people struggling with extreme isolation and crippling depression. Shut-ins unable to leave their homes. Hoarders living in filth. I speak to retired people who can no longer pay their rent and for whom, with no family to turn to for help, death seems easier than homelessness.
“Is this what we’ve really become as a society?” I ask myself. So selfish and cold. My problems are my problems and your problems are yours. If life becomes too unbearable, you can always just quit.
Clara knocks on my door. “Excuse me, Dr. Morgan, could I bother you for a moment?”
“What is it?”
“Judy Sinclair's lawyer just called. He says she’s hung herself.”
“Oh my god.”
“She’s named you in her will.”
“Me?”
“She’s left you everything she has.”
If we could kill ourselves just thinking, I want to die, how many of us would be left? How many of us would grit our teeth and stick around all the way to the bitter end? I used to be sure I’d make it to the end, but now I don’t know what I’d do.
In Judy’s will, she’s asked not to have a funeral. Her body is cremated and the ashes are buried. There’s no ceremony, no one to say goodbye to her but me. I leave a bouquet of roses on her grave, knowing they’ll wither soon, and once they’re gone, nobody will ever know that she was missed.
I manage to get a hold of Judy’s daughter. I offer to give her the money. Evie refuses, though.
“It’s my mother’s decision,” she says. “If she doesn’t want me to have the money, I don’t want it.””
It’s not much money. A few hundred thousand dollars. Enough to help someone, but not enough to change somebody’s life. Especially not in the world we have now.
I put the money in a savings account. I don’t know what I’ll do with it. I don’t want to spend it. It feels cursed.
I go to my vacation in Italy and do my best to enjoy myself. During the days, go to the beach, find an empty chair, and then lie there reading books and listening to the waves crash on the shore.
When it gets dark, I go back to the hotel. I eat dinner alone at the restaurant. I make small talk with the waiters and waitresses. I drink a few too many glasses of wine, stumble back to my room, and fall asleep in the enormous, unfathomably soft bed.
The trip isn’t bad, but it’s not great. It’s a trip. A break from my routine. I don’t want to go back to Seattle, but then my vacation ends, and I’m back again. My life no different than before. Yet, I sense that I’ve changed.
My first meeting of the day is with Ms. Patricia Morales. She’s fifty-seven. She looks healthy. According to her financial records, she has close to two million dollars in the bank.
“What’s the reason you’ve come to the Terminal Care Clinic, Ms. Morales?” I ask her.
“I feel very sad,” she tells me. “I have no friends. I don’t talk to my family anymore. All day long, I just sit at home and watch TV. I don’t want to spend another ten or twenty years doing this. I just want to die and leave this world. I want to see what comes next, whatever it is.”
“You have no sons or daughters or other family pressuring you into making this decision?”
“This decision is all mine.”
We talk a little longer, and then I sign off on her request to die and explain the procedure.
“In two weeks, you’ll come back here,” I say. “You’ll walk with me back to our Final Stage room. It’s a small, comfortable room. Not too bright. Your family can join you in the room. Whoever you want to say goodbye to. I’ll give you some time alone with them to say your goodbyes, and then I’ll come back into the room to give you an injection of a benzodiazepine. This drug will make you feel much more relaxed. Once your blood pressure drops, I’ll inject the next drug. At this point, you shouldn’t care much about what is going on anymore. You should feel very happy and sleepy. You’ll yawn, close your eyes, fall asleep, and then that will be that. Your life will be over.”
My job isn’t to dissuade people from dying. It never was. My job is to hold their hands as I gently push them over the edge. To give action to that voice in their heads, begging, “kill me.” I need preserve my heart for myself. For my children if I ever have any. I wish I’d realized this sooner.
Ms. Morales thanks me and then leaves my office. Clara sends my next patient in.