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Foreword

I don’t know what my booze bill was for that time, but I’m sure it was big. I had a good reason, though: I had to kill my parents. They asked me to. Actually, they asked me to help them with their suicides, and I did. And if that doesn’t justify throwing back an extra glass or three of Jameson’s on the rocks, then I don’t know what does.

My father was Louis Jolyon “Jolly” West, MD, a world-renowned psychiatrist and former chairman of the department of psychiatry at the University of California, Los Angeles, age seventy-four. My mother was Kathryn “K” West, PhD, a respected clinical psychologist at the West Los Angeles (Brentwood) Veterans Administration Hospital, age seventy-five.

Jolly and K were wonderful people–brilliant, academic medical professionals, highly cultured, and well-rounded. Neither was at all religious, but both had deep insight into the human condition. They knew what was what. And they knew what they wanted.

So when they made their wishes clear to me, I wasn’t about to argue. I respected my father and mother, and I loved them. And I believe, as they did, in freedom of choice, the right to personal privacy and self-determination–which includes reproductive choice (as the law now recognizes, although it didn’t used to), the right to refuse medical treatment (as the law now recognizes, although it didn’t used to), and the right to choose death with dignity (as the law does not recognize–not yet–although a few states are getting close).

My father’s desire to end his life did not shock me, especially since his newly discovered cancer–a particularly vicious type–was literally eating him up and would take him from playing tennis to lying dead in just five months. Should Jolly have been forced to endure a few more days or weeks of agony just to satisfy some people’s notions that death should be “natural”?

And what about my mother? K had midstage Alzheimer’s disease, plus osteoporosis and emphysema. Should she have been forced to deteriorate into a walking vegetable, soiling herself, wandering into traffic, hunched over like a crab, and coughing up blood, just because some people say that’s how it’s always been and always should be?

Jolly and K said no. And I agreed.

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The Last Goodnights is starting to be included in course curricula at a number of educational institutions, from U.C.L.A.’s “Mind, Medicine, and Culture” to Ashford University’s “Legal and Ethical Issues for Health Professionals.”  Additionally, John West has lectured at the University of Southern California’s School of Gerontology as well as the Brentwood and Sepulveda V.A. Hospitals’ Psychiatry Grand Rounds.

Book Clubs: John West has appeared at various book club discussions across the country, usually via speakerphone but sometimes in person when scheduling allows.  Please feel free to contact him regarding participating in your book club’s discussion of The Last Goodnights.