Death With Dignity

There was a banner flung over a freeway overpass this morning that read, "Death With Dignity." It's about a Washington state initiative, #1000, I believe, the "suicide" law, the right-to-die regulation, the euthanasia enactment. As I drove under it, I thought about a woman who died last week, without much dignity. 

Last Thursday, on this same freeway, about a mile north of the banner, I was walking on another overpass as cars whizzed by below. A half an hour before my walk, a woman was stabbed as she sat riding in the front passenger seat of a green SUV. The vehicle was headed south in the left lane as a guy in the back seat reached around, grabbed the woman in a choke hold and then stabbed her in the neck and chest. Many times. 

I stared at the car below me surrounded by six orange traffic barrels strung with yellow police barrier tape. There were a dozen or so police and state troopers wandering around, wearing plastic gloves and grim faces. Some were working the scene, some were directing traffic, some were  doing nothing. It was obvious the car had stopped quickly, it was angled off the road and I wondered what it must have been like in the car at the moment it happened. Did she even have time to react? Was it a carjacker? What provoked such a savage attack? I saw the shaken driver of the car, sitting on the freeway divider, his head in his hands. He looked like an regular guy, and I felt such sorrow for him. He was so distraught. The stabber had already been taken away as had the woman, to a nearby hospital, where she later died.

There was no blood, no skid marks, no sign of a struggle and when the whole scene was cleared up it was as if nothing happened at all. That's the way it is, I thought, when all is cleaned up, it is over. Traffic returned and the millions of people that will drive over that asphalt will never know a woman's life was taken in one swift, maniacal moment. 

I thought about bringing flowers to the spot where it happened for the women who died with no dignity, but I didn't. Other calamities have taken its place. I'll forget about this one.