The Eugene (Oregon) Register-Guard newspaper printed this story 1/17/01

By Karen McCowan, Columnist, The Register-Guard

Bev Heitz is plain-spoken, not polished. She's never been political. She was so indifferent to Oregon's controversial physician-assisted suicide law that she didn't even vote on the measure.

"I didn't have strong feelings either way," she said with a shrug during a recent interview. "It was something that was never going to touch my house."

Wrong.

Her fit, active husband would soon be diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a fatal neuromuscular disease characterized by progressive muscle weakness resulting in paralysis.

"Here's who we're talking about," Heitz said, plunking a photo of Arnie Heitz on the coffee shop table between us.

It's a picture taken in their Junction City kitchen shortly after their 1995 wedding. It makes you laugh, if only because their two pet cockatiels are perched on his head as he grins into the camera. There's no hint of the coming horror - at 50, he still had the lean, muscular frame he developed as a Nebraska farm boy.

It was spring 1999 when Arnie uncharacteristically went to the doctor, complaining of numbness in his leg. A truck driver, he thought maybe he'd torn a ligament jumping out of his rig. By June, they had a much worse explanation: ALS, the same disease that killed New York Yankee baseball great Lou Gehrig in 1941. Two to four years, the doctor told Arnie.

He didn't last one.

"It's a horrible disease," said Steven Merwin, a Sacred Heart Hospice social worker who leads an ALS Support Group that Arnie attended. "There's no cure. The patient ends up losing all neuromuscular skills, but remains fully cognizant."

For Arnie, pain was an issue as well - muscle spasms that would leave tears rolling down his cheeks as Bev or other caregivers tried to straighten his curling, cramping fingers and toes.

Still, Bev resisted when Arnie tried to bring up the subject of assisted suicide. She still didn't want to think about it.

"I kept putting him off and putting him off," she said. "Finally I agreed to bring him the phone, but I told him, `You'll have to make the call yourself.' "

Which he did. He called Portland-based Compassion in Dying. Because he was now bedridden and on a morphine pump, they sent a doctor to him.

"He came out to the house and spent at least an hour talking to Arnie. I was impressed with how in-depth he interviewed him, to make sure this was what he wanted. They talked to him alone, and they talked to him with me in the room. They asked him, 'Do you understand your disease? Are you sure this is really what you want to do? Have you thought about what suicide will do to your family?' "

They also talked to Bev. "I never thought I could accept suicide under any circumstances," she said. "But I realized what I really couldn't accept was that he was dying. I told him I would stand by him whatever he chose to do."

Recalling that moment more than six months later, tears spill from her light brown eyes. "He was so glad of it," she whispered. "I think he felt relieved. Like he was in charge again. He felt everything was going to be OK."

A week or two later, the doctor returned for a second visit.

"He asked the same questions again. And Arnie had to put his request in writing," she said. He barely managed to sign his name.

Arnie died of ALS before he got his lethal prescription.

"He died at 7:30 a.m. and they called that afternoon to say it was ready," Bev said.

While she wishes that she'd agreed to start the process earlier, Bev believes Arnie was helped tremendously just knowing assisted suicide would soon be an option for him.

Victoria Putnam, Bev's daughter and one of Arnie's caregivers, saw a change once Arnie knew a prescription would be written. He cried more. He talked more about his death. He asked her to take care of Bev for him.

"He knew he didn't have control over anything else anymore, but at least he had control over this," she said.

Merwin, who also cared for Arnie as part of his Sacred Heart Hospice team, agreed. "It was peace of mind for him - he wanted control of his life and death," Merwin said. (While Sacred Heart employees don't participate in assisted suicide because it contradicts Catholic doctrine, they continue to care for patients who make that choice.)

Bev contacted me because she fears that Oregon's law might be gutted by opponents in Congress. She wanted to tell her story publicly so people who don't have strong feelings about physician-assisted suicide - people like me, people like she used to be - will consider one thing.

"It's just so important to have this available, "she said. "Until you've been through this, until you've seen someone you love in so much agony, you just can't understand."