James T. Sutter in his final year at Townsend Harris High School in Queens, still today rated at or near the top of the city's high schools, and (below), as a young man growing up in the Depression in Queens, the son of an N.Y.C. police inspector.

The Intervention

My dad was 78, sharp as hell, and in otherwise good shape.

By John W. Sutter

When my dad told us he was “going to do an intervention,” we thought he was talking about injecting himself with an intentional overdose of morphine. He was, after all, a retired physician (a psychiatrist) and had been self-administering morphine for pain relief.

He had been suffering for about two years with colon, rectal, and prostate cancer, and had had several surgeries including one that left him with a colostomy. He had undergone extensive radiation and chemotherapy, and was in a ton of pain.

I remember the day in California that he first started noting the pain. It was around the time of my brother’s wedding, in 1994, and my father was convinced the pain stemmed from another bout of hemorrhoid attacks. If only his affliction were that benign. In a few days he found out that he had a tumor, and several cancers below the belt, and then the surgeries began.

The second to last time I saw him I presented him with the great news that my wife, Kathleen, was pregnant, due in May 1996. He told me how badly he wanted to hang on until the birth. We had gone out to a restaurant to celebrate, and he had injected himself with morphine before leaving so he could make it through the meal. He had brought along one of those rubber-circle tubes to sit on to try to get some relief, but he was clearly in agony. He kept standing up, rearranging the tube and sitting down again. Finally he told us he couldn’t bear the pain anymore and had to get back home.

It was the visit after that that he told my brother and me that he was going to do an intervention. My dad, James T. Sutter, was 78, sharp as hell, and in otherwise good shape. One of the problems with cancer below the belt is that critical vital organs that keep you alive – heart, lungs, brain — are all doing their job, so you stay alive with this incredible pain in the lower regions. He was down to about 125 pounds, from 180, and clearly was wasting away. He told us his prognosis was zero, that he was on a several-month’s downward trajectory to death, and that the pain was unbearable. So when he told us he had in mind “to do an intervention” it sounded perfectly rational to us. He was always a very rational person, and parent.

We knew what kind of pain he was in, and strongly supported him. My brother and I knew how much dad’s ultimate fear was not death but loss of independence and dignity. As a physician, he had spent years of his life working in and around hospitals, and near the top of the ladder. For him to be at the mercy of nurses and orderlies, and subject to the care and decisions of others, would not serve. He was terrified of being trapped in the hospital system in a ruined body, unable to extricate himself.

My brother bought him a copy of Derek Humphry’s Final Exit, euthanasia’s most famous and controversial textbook, put out by what was then the Hemlock Society. The Hemlock Society made it its business to know the best way and the worst way to do it.

The last time my dad had touched a gun we think was when he was a Navy officer and young physician on a hospital ship off of the Normandy coast in 1944. We were pretty sure my dad would simply choose to overdose on morphine, but as he thumbed through the book we shared with him some of its useful tips on “hastening” death.

We pointed out that morphine doesn’t always work because you can build up a tolerance, go into a coma, and are ultimately revived in the hospital. Shooting yourself in the head is messy, and many peoples’ Darwinian instinct for self-preservation means that they tip the gun upward while pulling the trigger, seriously wounding themselves, but living. Shooting yourself in the heart is not a good way to go because most people do not really know where their heart is, and can miss it even if they do.

At this last bit of offered information, my dad smiled. “I know where my heart is,” he said.

What he did surprised us all. He want out and purchased a handgun at one of those “easy-in, easy-out” Florida gun stores. We’re not sure how closely he planned the exact moment, but he found an opportunity when Clare, his wife of the last 25 years, had accepted an invitation for dinner with a few friends at the local golf club. He feigned illness and insisted that he not ruin the party but she should go without him. After she had left, he pulled a collapsible garden chair into the shower, sat down, and blew a hole in his chest.

My dad was a bit of a misanthrope, but the memorial service had an overflow crowd of friends and colleagues from the retirement community. They considered him an intellectual heavyweight, and liked his informed, and free, medical advice, albeit administered with a biting and somewhat dark sense of humor. The elephant in the room was that he had taken his own life. We sensed that there was a recognition of courage, but no one could talk about it. When it was my turn to eulogize, I told them how proud I was that my dad had lived, and died, with independence and dignity.

He left no suicide note to any of his four children but he did leave one to Clare.  It was read to my sister, and in it he said: “I love my children.” Why no personal note to the kids, i.e., to me? I have often written it in my mind. Things we wish our parents had said to us. It’s not that I had a lifetime of “I love you’s” from Dad to fill in the silence.

Years later, someone got hold of the autopsy report, and it quickly made the rounds of the family. It was a pretty straightforward journey through James Sutter’s internal organs. He had blown two ribs out in his back, and punctured his lungs, pancreas, liver, and spleen. The bullet killed him instantly, the report said.

But he missed his heart.

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John W. Sutter is publisher of The Villager, the Downtown Express, the Gay City News, and NYCPlus.

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