THE POLITICS OF DYING

            My 91 year old beloved friend, Ruth Goodman, died yesterday. Over the last fifty years, Ruth and I had grown even closer and more important to each other than we were in the early days of protesting the Vietnam War together. So my loss is great, but it is mitigated by remembering Ruth’s dedicated activism in several political movements, including the Death with Dignity movement.

            I was privileged to spend the last five days of her life with Ruth, and when I wrote her obituary shortly before her death, she insisted I include the important anticipated fact that, right to the end, she was in control of her death. Below, I have posted her obituary and the letter to newspaper editors that she wrote to be sent after her death. That letter is just one of the ways that Ruth’s dedication to justice lives on.

           When Ruth made her decision about the time and manner of her death, she was following a life-long commitment to acting on principle. It is one thing to say you will take your own life when the time is right. It's quite another to do it. For Ruth the right to die with dignity was as important as other civil and human rights for which she had campaigned. It was my privilege to witness Ruth's steadfast determination to be in control of when and how she died, right to the very end. Here is the letter she wrote to newspaper editors the day before she died:

 "I am a ninety-one-year-old woman who has decided to end my life in the very near future. I do not have a terminal illness; I am simply old, tired and becoming dependent, after a wonderful life of independence. People are allowed to choose the right time to terminate their animals' lives and can be with them and provide assistance and comfort right to the end. Surely, the least we can do is allow people the same rights to choose how and when to end their lives. By the time people read this, I will have died. I am writing this letter to advocate for a change in the law so that all will be able to make this choice."

RUTH GOODMAN OBITUARY

Ruth Goodman has led a life of resistance to war and a commitment to the environment and social justice. Her family fled Eastern Europe at the turn of the last century to escape war and anti-Semitism, and she grew up in a union household. In 1940 Ruth married Henry Goodman, and found a job in the shipyards. As a clerical worker, Ruth was paid $20 dollars a week, and when she discovered that welders made $1.25 an hour she joined the wave of women's participation in wartime industrial production.

After the war, Ruth and Henry moved to Washington State, where Ruth gave birth to two sons, Michael and Dean. Soon she joined the American Friends Service Committee in organizing annual peace marches, and picketing the Boeing Company in protest of their manufacturing aircraft used in the Vietnam War. 

In 1966, worried about their two sons being eligible for the draft in a few years, Ruth and Henry left the United States to settle in Vancouver. But Ruth's activism didn't stop. She and Henry offered U.S. draft resisters a safe haven in their home and Ruth volunteered at the War Resisters' support office.

Ruth's participation in political campaigns was not confined to international issues. Through her personal experience of two illegal abortions in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Ruth developed a heightened awareness of the importance of a woman's right to reproductive choice, including abortion. Her strong belief in the right to legal, safe access to abortion led her to be among the first volunteers for the Everywoman's Health Centre, an abortion clinic.

Ruth's commitment to justice remained strong to the end of her life. She has been a staunch advocate of the Death with Dignity social justice movement. True to her principles, with the support of her children and a host of devoted friends, at the age of ninety-one, Ruth chose to end her life on Februrary 2nd, 2013. She is survived by Michael Goodman and his partner Sharon Sjerven, Dean Goodman and his wife, Janna Levitt, as well as grandsons, Henry, Eric and Gabriel Gooman.

To carry on his parent's commitments to justice, Michael Goodman has established the Ruth and Henry Goodman Fund for Social and Economic Justice. Instead of flowers, donations may be made to that organization. http://ruthandhenrygoodmanfund.com/.

THE WAY IT USED TO BE - BUT IS NO MORE

These rules aren't relics of the eighteenth century. It was a big advance for girls to be permitted to play baseball at all. I know it wasn't centuries ago because i was in high school when these draconian rules came into play.

Women obviously have a long way to go before the patriarchs and their supporters move over to make room for equal rights, but to evaluate the tasks ahead we ought to take a look back at how far we've come, just since I was a girl, for instance. Click on the link, and you'll see what I mean."http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/voices-in-time/a-l..."

IRAQIS I SAW FOR MYSELF

Fatah was a graduate student at the University and her professor invited me to interview her so it was a rare opportunity to spend an hour alone with a very articulate Iraqi woman. She worked hard to be polite to me, but her fury kept rising to the surface."Iraqis," she said, "are very proud of their country. ..We have a right to have our country. To be safe. To live in peace.... We had to rebuild everything and now they want to destroy it all again...."   

This girl's photo was posted along with many other memorials to adults and children who had rushed to a Baghdad shelter, where U.S. missiles killed 400 noncombatants. It is now a kind of museum of horror.

Here I am with children outside their school

On our one trip to the market, I often fell behind the others so I could take pictures, and this charming girl took it upon herself to see that I caught up with the rest of the group. She is probably about nineteen years old, and I often think of her, wondering whether she's still alive.

The hotel lobby manager, Abida, and I struck up a friendly relationship. One day the elevators didn't work and she locked the door to the stairs because the children played in the stairwell inappropriately. I worried about a U.S. bomb hitting the hotel and no one being able to get out. We laughed when we saw the irony of that.  

We saw an number of children in the hospital, who nearly all looked as bewildered or frightened as this girl. We were told that they were likely casualties of depleted uranium and the problems were exacerbated by the twelve years of sanctions that often applied to crucial medicines.

This is one of the lucky mothers whose baby was born normal, not deformed as were many of the others

We are told not to worry. There will be “no boots on the ground.” We are told there is no contradiction between that promise and the assertion that “all options are on the table.” Yet the drums of war beat louder and louder and I hold my breath. 
Wondering who will be next, I think about the Iraqis I met in 2002, six months before American boots landed on their ground. “What are the chances,” I wonder, “that the locals who treated me with generosity and warmth are still alive. Were they wiped out by an i.e.d., while buying mangos at a market? Maybe a suspicious “pattern” of gathering with friends got them targeted and assassinated by a U.S. missile or drone? With the war on Iraqis and Afghanistan not over yet, haven’t we seen enough carnage?

As I write this, the news tells me my government is supplying weapons to Syrian rebels. (Apparently, that means more weapons, because the administration has already been sending some weapons there.) I long to see the people of Syria for myself. I worry especially about the men “of military age.” I imagine they look a lot like the guys I talked and laughed with at the Afghan guest house and on the streets of Baghdad.

            Here are photos of some of the men, and women and children I met on those trips and wrote about in Seeing for Myself.

IRAQ 

"Military age" men playing board game on the street

The rest of my group had gone to an Internet Cafe, and I took the rare opportunity to go out on the streets alone. "A couple of boys noticed my video camera...and started mugging for it. They giggled excitedly. Older boys joined us, then a few grown men. Soon we were all laughing at our inability to speak each other's language.
SfM page 204 

School boys chanting "Down With Bush!"

Our group was surprised when we visited a school and found the entire student body greeting us with signs and chants of "Down With Bush; Down With Bush! These children must now be of a "military age" - if they are still alive.

SPEAKING OF AGE

“You’re not old,” I was told, not for the first time, by a friend in his 50s. I had just begun to explain how a situation looked from my perspective as an old person, when he protested my use of the dirty word “old.” From the near-panicked look on his face, you’d have thought I’d begun to describe a sexually transmitted disease at a sedate dinner party. To many 50-year-olds the very word “old” may, indeed, seem as unnerving as “gonorrhea.” But avoiding the word will not enable us to deny our way out of the last stages of life. Even a tummy tuck, hair graft or a dose of Viagra won’t enable us to jog through our 60s and 70s without becoming old on the way. 

            Once you hit 60, some people, including age mates, may refer to you as an “elder,” a term of respect that assumes you’ve been acquiring wisdom, rather than, year after year, stubbornly practicing mistakes, as some of us do. “Older” inexplicably implies you are not really old yet, and is meant to blur the naked truth of the stage of life you have reached. But a glance at a basic grammar book will tell you the suffix “-er,” a comparative adjective, means “more so,” not less so.  So why do “tall-er,” “fat-ter,” “young-er” and “smart-er” designate more than the root word without its suffix, while “old-er” is meant to imply you are less old? If the question confuses you, that probably means your head is on straight. 

If, at 62, instead of using the euphemism “senior,” you bluntly ask for an old person’s discount at a movie theater, the clerk may greet the request with a puzzled frown or nervous giggle. A recent professional publication referred to it’s theme as the “autumn of life,” meaning of course, the life of the old.  Okay, along with the autumn leaves, our arches and jowls fall, and some of us are more vulnerable to the vicissitudes of aging bodies and minds.  But, like stalwart oaks, many remain both resilient and sturdy, even in the “winter of life.”

When will we begin to view old age as a stage of life that needn’t be an embarrassment, that is neither wholly good nor bad, but a mix of delights, losses and complex challenges?   When will we recognize that to lose our clear sight, short-term memory and even the capacity to walk unaided is not a matter for shame or secrecy?  That it is not somethinglike death in this cultureto be whispered or referred to only in euphemistic language?  Sure, anxieties, aches, pains and new losses make their appearances.  But we might cheerfully bid farewell to stresses on the way up the career ladder or worry over what the neighbors will think.  Those losses can clear the decks, so we can do as we please for a few years. 

In recent decades many oppressed groups have burst out of socially imposed closets.  We can join those who have re-claimed descriptors such as “queer,” “Black,” or “African American.”  It’s time to stop fooling around with words meant to deny the existence of the last phases of life.  It’s time to boldly re-claim the solid, reality-based status implied in that venerable word: “old.”

A slightly modified version of this article was published in Prime Time.

SEEING AFGHANS

Wondering who will be next, I think about the Iraqis I met in 2002, six months before American boots landed on their ground. A stream of memories courses through my mind as I picture the Afghans I spent time with in 2005. The boys who survived the past eleven years of rampant violence are now young men "of military age," at risk of being targeted by U.S. drones or other weaponry. The women are subjected to the rule of warlords, oppressive regimes and the traditions of their country, regardless of what government is in charge.
I wanted to see beyond the burqas Western media loved to portray. I wanted to see for myself whether the women were completely cowed by their fathers, husbands, government, Imams, elders and warlords. So in 2005 I signed on to a women-focused trip to Afghanistan with Global Exchange. Some women did wear burqas, though few women covered their faces in Kabul, where most of our time was spent.

This photo was taken from my guest house window.
Another day "a woman walked toward the building with the short front panel of her burqa tossed back off her face...(usually when a woman wore a burqa only their hands were visible) I impulsively grabbed my camera and from behind the curtain pointed it toward the woman. I felt certain she couldn't see me. But she hurriedly pulled her burqa over her face again and I immediately felt ashamed at my intusion. As soon as she passed my window she flipped her burqa off her face again, then looked back over her shoulder with a big, devilish grin. As if to say "Gotcha!" She clearly wore the burqa exactly as she chose. Page 237. SfM

 On a very rare trip outside of Kabul we visited an area that had hundreds of land mines. We were fitted with protective garb and watched the workers, with slow, tedious labor, get rid of land mines one by one to make the area inhabitable.

These posters were hanging on the walls of some NGO offices. They reminded me of posters that were on the walls of the University YWCA in the '70s and '80s in Seattle, where Seattle Rape Relief started. Or in the Women's Institute where I started the Abused Women's Network.

This woman is a dynamic doctor whose clinic we were scheduled to visit. But it turned out to be too dangerous, so she came to us. She was raising funds to pay for a doctor's housing and office near the clinic because no one would work there unless living  expenses for their families were paid for.

Hossai Andar was a Parliamentary candidate I interviewed after the rest of the group left. I asked if she had a message for Americans. "I came one week ago from a training at Chico State University in California," she said. "It was very good for me because before I went there I thought the U.S government and the people's policies were the same. But after I met people in the U.S.A. I saw that they are different....When I came back I knew that Americans want a good life for all people and peace in Afghanistan."

 

This woman was distressed because she owned a beauty shop, and since NGOs had been overrunning Kabul, the rents had gone up. Her shop rent increased 400 percent, so she had to give it up.The beauty style is rather like Bollywood. She came to the home of Mitra for my interview.

Mitra had recently received a micro loan which enabled her to buy a second sewing machine and hire a second employee.
Many of the dresses they made were for special occasions such as weddings, where black is the appropriate color.

She hopes to buy a third machine and to hire another worker.

She loved showing of her work and

said her husband was happy that
she earned more money than he did.

Soroya works for an NGO that arranges micro loans. Our group interviewed her, but I wanted to talk to the women who actually received the loans, women like Mitra. I stayed two days after the group left.

Mitra is full of life and optimism.

She talks fast and with great emotion.

This is Mitra's new worker

 This is one of our guides. She is standing in front of the jail, which we had hoped to visit. Girls like the waifs above are often picked up by police for running away to escape a forced marriage. In jail many of them are never charged with any crime. Their families may not want them back, so they are incarcerated for long periods with no hope of relief.

The children are the hope of the future.

This was at the school owned by our guest house

hosts. We were told it was okay to photographs,
but obviously some young girls were shy when they
saw the camera. Usually children were happy to
be photographed. Many of the girls in other class rooms
did not wear scarfs.

Soroya Ebaddi is an administrator in the school
where the girls learn sewing, among other lessons.
She was a candidate for Parliament, but she lost. I asked her what she would like to see changed.
 "No wars, no discrimination, no problems for
anyone. Everyone will respect each other. Human
rights. No problems of guns and wars."
Page 242. SfM.

SEEING IRAQIS

We are told not to worry. There will be “no boots on the ground in Syria.” We are told there is no contradiction between that promise and the assertion that “all options are on the table.” Yet the drums of war beat louder and louder and I hold my breath. What are the chances, I wonder, that the locals who treated me with generosity and warmth are still alive. Were they wiped out by an i.e.d., while buying mangos at a market? Maybe a suspicious “pattern” of gathering with friends got them targeted and assassinated by a U.S. missile or drone? With the war on Iraqis and Afghanistan not over yet, haven’t we seen enough carnage?

As I write this, the news tells me my government is supplying weapons to Syrian rebels. (Apparently, that means more weapons, because the administration has already been sending some weapons there.) I long to see the people of Syria for myself. I worry especially about the men “of military age.” I imagine they look a lot like the guys I talked and laughed with at the Afghan guest house and on the streets of Baghdad.

            Here are photos of some of the men, and women and children I met on those trips and wrote about in Seeing for Myself.

IRAQ (Afghanistan photos are psted on a separate blog.)

Men of "military age" on the street with board game

It was a rare occasion when I escaped the group to wander the streets alone. "A couple of boys noticed my video camera and...started mugging for me...Several older boys joined us...then a few grown men. Soon we were all laughing ...since none of us spoke more than a few words of the others' language." SFM page 204 

Boys shouting "Down With Bush

Our group was invited to visit a boys' school and imagine our surprise when we were greeted by the entire school gathered in the courtyard to shout, "Down, with Bush, down with Bush" over and over, while the teachers looked on with apparent pleasure.

Boy working at what looked like a tool shop

Boys who looked about 11 or 12 worked in various Baghdad shops along a major avenue on the way to the market. They all greeted us tourists warmly and looked as if they loved their jobs. Because of the danger we were only allowed one trip to a market, a very brief one.

Another happy worker. If he is alive he  is of "military age" now

Girls shouting "Down with Bush"

Geiger counter on "Highway of Death"

One of mmy tanks left on the Highway of Death. Years after the Gulf War had supposedly ended, Depleted Uranium was still poisoning the air and threateneng the lives of fetuses and new born babies.

 Our group visited the Highway of Death near Basra. When Iraqi troops gave up their fight in the Gulf War they left their tanks behind. As they were escaping, U.S. forces continued bombing with Depleted Uranium-tipped weaponry. It is widely believed that the DU caused numerous births of seriously deformed fetuses and infants. The Geiger counter showed that the carcinogenic substance was still present in the tanks

Uum Khaidars' family.

Mustafa, Umm Khaidar's six-year-old son and his
brother, Khaidar "had been playing with other
children outside the house. ...an explosion of a
U.S. satellite-guided missile... Khaidar rushed
outside, where she found Khaidar covered with
blood. She could see that he was dead and she
could only carry one boy so she picked up
Mustafa....Nineteen children playing that day
were killed."  SFM page 196-7

Most children in the hospital were suffering from cancer, 

apparently caused by Depleted Uranium possibly inhaled by 

there fathers in the war. They looked frightened, but this girl's

smile lit up the room.

Everywhere we went we were greeted by warmth and welcomes. This is my room mate , Sharon, with  the children of one of the families we visited in Baghdad.