Until last week, I’d never heard of Thomas Young. But on March 13, Bill Peace published a disturbing post on his Bad Cripple Blog, titled “Thomas Young and Suicide: All the Wrong Questions Asked.“:
I have not thought about Thomas Young in quite some time. He was featured in the 2007 documentary Body of War directed by Phil Donahue and Ellen Spiro. Body of War was a critically acclaimed film that was deemed “emotionally ravaging” and a “stunning achievement”. I found the film to be morbidly depressing, a perfect dissection of how the media can manipulate young altruistic people interested in making an important contribution to society. Thomas Young was one of many men in the aftermath of the attacks of September 11 that joined the military to make the world a safer place. He accepted without thought that America was going to fight the good fight, the “War on Terror”. Young sincerely wanted to search and destroy those responsible, the so called “evil doers” to use Bush’s words. In April 2004, Young’s fifth day in Iraq, the reality of war was made all too real. Young was was shot and paralyzed on what he described to be a poorly planned mission. Body of War effectively juxtaposed Young’s struggle coping with paralysis against the propaganda used by the Bush administration to justify going to war.
Young I had assumed went on to have a good life. This did not happen apparently. Based on an article I read by Chris Hedges http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_crucifixion_of_tomas_young_20130310/ Young has struggled mightily and has entered into hospice care to die even though he is not terminally ill. Since his injury, Young has taken a laundry list of medications (carbamazepine, coumadin, tizanidine, gabapentin, bupropion, omeprazole, and morphine were mentioned in Body of War). According to Hedges in 2008 Young had a blood clot in his arm, was given blood thinners and briefly hospitalized. A month later the clot migrated to his lung. He experienced a major pulmonary embolism and lapsed into a coma. When he emerged from the coma his speech was slurred and he had lost the use of his upper body as well as his short term memory. Young subsequently started having severe abdominal pain and in desperation had his colon removed and now uses a colostomy bag. This is what I would characterize as a clinical cascade. Without question Young has suffered.
To make a long story short, Young is going to commit suicide (his words) by starvation. He has a feeding tube, but it’s not entirely clear that he gets all his nutrition that way or if the tube is the only way to ensure he’ll take in enough calories every day. Hospice will be involved – and, I’m guessing – that since he’s on a feeding tube it’s seen as a simple voluntary withdrawal of life-sustaining treatment, allowing Young to die peacefully. Except, of course, Young looks at his death as a suicide (I guess no one told him he should use words like “the feeding tube is a burden”). It’s a reminder that while there are plenty of scenarios in which withdrawal/refusal of treatment is distinct from suicide, there are plenty of other situations in which the distinction isn’t clear at all – especially to the person who makes the decision to end their life. I’m willing to bet that the hospice professionals who’ll work with Young would get indignant and angry if I or someone else said they were facilitating a suicide; if I pointed out that Young himself looks at his death as a suicide what would they say then?
I explored a little more and discovered that Stephen Kuusisto had written about Thomas Young on March 12 at Planet of the Blind. Here’s the opening to his “Chis Hedges and Wounded Warriors“:
When I was in college I had a pal who liked to play what I called “comparative pain”. His life had been hard with an abused childhood, small town poverty; then, a turn of fortune that he learned to hate–a scholarship to the local private college where, among very rich students he perceived his deficiencies all the more.
We used to sit up late and drink bourbon and argue about everything from the merits of T.S. Eliot’s verse to the lathered stupidities of fraternity boys who drove BMWs and spoke with diphthongs though they were from New Jersey and Long Island–they had the faux patrician accents one hears at private schools in these United States. We imagined the advent of this pretentious accent was a result of vanishing elocution classes for the rich–that in the time of Franklin Roosevelt one learned how to speak with true “back bench” verve. We decided this was another thing ruined by the 60’s. So young rich boys had to invent a patois on their own and of course they weren’t equal to the task. You can still hear this accent at America’s tonier colleges. It hasn’t gone away.
So we had fun in the manner of boys with weak super-egos, or, we had fun until we had too much bourbon when we’d invariably turn our attention to “who had it hardest” and that’s when I learned comparative pain is a poor contest. I claimed that having a disability I was wretched. And my pal would relate how his cruel older brother locked him in a closet and no one bothered to find him. We’d argue until bitterness overtook us and then we’d impeach each other’s character. We were both depressed, each convinced our problems were external.
I’ve only given you a short excerpt from each of these blog posts. Please go read them both in their entirety.:
Thomas Young and Suicide: All the Wrong Questions Asked by Bill Peace.
Chris Hedges and Wounded Warriors by Stephen Kuusisto
The Crucifixion of Tomas Young by Chris Hedges
I am “pushing myself” physically to write this because I don’t know how ill I’ll be later…So I shall sacrifice perhaps a better written comment for “getting it done” – CFS/ME severely escalated, but coming down to “plateau” after mid-Feb. escalation. I used to call it the “Cinderella disease” – when my husband would ask “why are you rushing?” “Because I only have a few minutes of work time before the illness knocks me down.”
When I read Stephen’s blog entry, yesterday?, I didn’t realize who Thomas Young is. Not until I was abed this morning, listening to “DemocracyNow” on the radio, forcing myself to listen carefully because if history predicts the present and future, I knew DemNow was probably going to screw it up in re disability.
I wrote a couple of notes, at the end, to not divert attention from what I was listening to, during the show.
The #1 observation:
There was only one disabled person on the show, Thomas
Young- although co-host Juan Gonzalez, right at the top of the show, stated that “this” (Thomas Young, one of many, similar stories) was being repeated in many homes across the country.
Phil Donahue was there. I saw the DemNow show when the film was released, six years ago(?) and wrote the show of the flaws I saw then (and don’t remember the words).
Phil Donahue called Thomas Young “a hero” for planning to kill himself. How could Thomas Young change his mind after being called a “hero” for publicly stating he’s going to “off” himself for pain and suffering.
Amy Goodman and Phil Donahue showed now, what I think I said then, a lack of knowing people who are disabled. I say that knowing Amy’s father had MS and used a scooter. (I’m no shrink and will not indulge in psychological speculation. It happens too often- that is, it’s done by writers about artists and people with disabilities, annoyingly often since about the 1970s when it started appearing in bios of artists I was reading.)
Observation #2: is the show reflecting Thomas Young’s seeming isolation from the community of people with disabilities, including other severely disabled veterans of U.S. wars on Iraq, Afghanistan and too darn many other places?
Impression: I had the same “bells” go off while listening as the flow of the show abruptly shifted from Thomas Young’s story, reviewing the film, his brief summary of his medical history since the film and his decision to kill himself (although had I not read Drake’s blog post, I’d be wondering but still am, why is someone going into a hospice if not terminal and to kill ones self?),
to reviewing the run-up to the war, much time spent on Phil’s being dumped from his tv show, Amy’s sound bites re same, footage from the film and Young wants to say something,
because Amy Goodman, the main host (Gonzalez sometimes co-hosting; I’ve been listening to the show for all the years it’s been on the air, starting at WBAI and still there but with hundreds of tv and radio stations added) said,
“Thomas, you wanted to say something-after the break.”
Break over, it’s Amy gives intro, then film excerpts resume, of vote to authorize use of force in U.S. Senate (after earlier having spent much time on Sen.Byrd’s solo protest – I sent Byrd a letter of “Bravo” at the time)…
And Thomas Young reads from his letter, as S.Drake covered in blog post.
Amy G. asks, “Thomas, is there anything that could convince you not to end your life in the next few months?”
Thomas Young, “Not at this time…” and fleshes it out a bit.
Before I say what this all has reminded me, I want to very carefully point out that I was opposed to the War on Iraq during the build up; I made art of protest before the war began and the art I made April 24, 2003 and got up on the internet as soon as I had a place in 2005, with the date in the margin (it’s also on the CLARA database of the NMWA with the wrong date, which I could not get them to fix- probably due to time, money limits at the museum).
But the feeling I had while listening was of “bells” going off, bells reminding me of how it was like a Jerry Lewis telethon, or the MS Society using my friend, now dead -and not from MS but from undiagnosed cancer, undiagnosed because the doctors were sure her new symptoms were just her MS, until 4 days before she died in 2000, my friend Marie, artist, for their fundraising. Thomas Young is the poster man for reminding people that the war was a bad thing.
He got back to what he wanted to say, in the last minutes of the show (continued online as interview after the show ended, but I came here- the revised DemNow website hurts my light sensitive eyes in its changed format), Amy G. asking him to read his letter, which is a strong reminder to George Bush of his “war crimes”.
Like the blogger of us in Australia, quoted on this blog site some months ago, at the time of the Brussels twin brothers who were deaf, committing assisted suicide because they were going to go blind from a disease “in the future”,
What other group (besides disabled) is encouraged to commit suicide? Or called “a hero” for planning to end his life?
Thank you. (No doubt I’ll remember more when I schlep back to bed, because CFS is the P.S. disease, but I got it done.) Too weak to check for typos.
My apologies for mis-spelling Tomas. I put the “h” in, and I’m someone who has grumbled at people for putting an “r” in my name all of my life. There is no “r” in Sanda.
No worries. I did the same thing. At least one other blogger did too. I could have edited all my misspellings but I figured it would better to fess up and move on. 🙂