MARY Levine and Jean Scott MacKellar are two former Honolulu women who sought public attention while facing death from cancer in order to create wider awareness of choices facing the terminally ill. Deaths of two former
Honolulu womenThis is their common bond. Their paths diverge dramatically.
Death came peacefully to Levine early last Saturday morning in a hospital bed in the living room of her home in Seattle. Her sons, Steve and Dave, were at her bedside. For several months a sign on her door had cautioned visitors not to dial 911 in any emergency.
Compassionate hospice personnel and friends had kept her comfortable after she fired a well-regarded physician because he insisted she take chemotherapy and radiation. He told her she was scared to live. She told him she had lived through many scary situations and the problem between them was his, not hers: He was afraid of death.
Levine was well-known in Seattle and the musical world. She had been music director and conductor of the Seattle Civic Light Opera. She performed worldwide, even amid revolutions.
This year, from a wheelchair in the pit of a large auditorium, she had been a sparkly eyed, fast-talking guest lecturer to University of Washington medical students about death at the end of a full life. She told them it was a significant part of life, not to be feared, much worth planning for.
Three years ago her husband, Joseph, former associate director of the Honolulu Symphony, died peacefully in her arms after a two-year illness. He cried out in his sleep, "Where's the audience? The concert's ready to start."
A front-page headline about her in the May 19 Seattle Times said, "As doctors learn how to handle death, it's the dying who do the teaching." It reported increased attention to compassionate care by medical schools which once saw death as a defeat and taught almost nothing about it. Comfort and personal autonomy now are being encouraged for the terminally ill.
Autonomy includes the right to refuse aggressive treatment, as Levine did. Her explanation: "I've been everywhere, done everything. I don't want to play games with God."
On a different track, MacKellar last January wrote 85 friends that she intended to take her life when her illness became intolerable. She said that taking one's life when one has lived fully should "be seen as an act of generosity and compassion for those one leaves behind. It will become a moral choice of those of high character. It will become a part of the planetary ethic."
Despite her opposition to guns, she decided a .38 caliber pistol would be the surest way to assure her death wouldn't be bungled.
ON April 18, somewhat hurriedly to avoid the gun in her purse being detected by friends who wanted to hospitalize her, she drove from her retirement home to a parking lot across from the Walnut Creek, Calif., police station, parked her 1989 Mazda with its vanity plates "2 AMOURS" and pulled the trigger. She did not want to sully her apartment at the Rossmoor retirement complex.
MacKellar was the author of four books including a love story about 1949 Hawaii entitled "Way Out Here," a 1976 book on rape reviewed as "a balanced account" and one on "Hawaii Goes Fishing" about modern adaptations of ancient Hawaiian fishing methods.
Survivors include her husband, Isaac John Lewis, in Cuba, and a daughter, Katha Sheehan-Stone of Key West, Fla., who told her mother's story in the publication Chronicle of the Keys. MacKellar's ashes were scattered in Havana at her request.