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