LAST RIGHTS: It was deadline day, and I was slammed, but it was my next-door neighbor on the horn. He’s the neighbor everyone wishes they had, and if he calls — ever — you simply take it. He’d been seized by an idea how to re-brand suicide, though the idea of “re-branding” anything was precisely the sort of abomination that would never cross his mind, let alone pass his lips.
At the time, the state legislature was debating a medically assisted suicide bill sponsored by a former hospice social worker turned state pol named Susan Talamantes Eggman. Governor Jerry Brown had not yet signed the bill, and the chances of Eggman’s bill making it out of the legislature appeared remote in the extreme. Members of the predominantly Roman Catholic Latino caucus had gotten their arms twisted and ears bent by anyone wearing a collar. The Church wanted this bill killed. Like most people with any mileage on planet Earth, my neighbor had either done his own dance with a deadly disease or watched a loved one forced to foxtrot their way to the bitter end. “The language is all wrong,” he exclaimed of the rhetoric used by the bill’s proponents. “No one wants to hear about ‘assisted suicide.’ It’s a loser.”
His solution? Call it something else. His suggestion? “Call it ‘Youdecide,’” he said. “Or if you want to be hip, you can spell it ‘Udecide.’”