The End in
Two Acts
Earlier that spring, a survey by the Field Research Corporation showed that California’s registered voters favored the physician-assisted death bill by a margin of 63% to 28%. But on June 28, 2006, two days after Tom McDonald’s testimony, the bill died in committee, defeated by a single vote.
During the months between Tom McDonald’s first and second surgeries David Bradley also was diagnosed as terminally ill. He had esophageal cancer, which is, like melanoma, tough to beat. He had noticed months before that he was having trouble swallowing, but David was not one to run to a doctor. He was 80 years old, and although he was Midwestern born and bred, he had become, in his later years, part desert rat, part cowboy.
He lived alone in the high desert of southwest New Mexico, up the road from the town where Billy the Kid had been a kid. He spent his days quietly, stopping every morning for coffee at a cowboy diner, riding his horse, Julio, painting, socializing, taking photographs. He had always been healthy. He still worked out at a gym several times a week. You could see it in his biceps. A member what Tom Brokaw dubbed “the greatest generation,” he defied the stereotype. He was a free spirit, a nature-lover, a man who carried an eagle feather talisman, a man who had married and parted company with four wives.
David Bradley had a peaceful life and a faithful dog and, that winter, a prognosis of six months to live. For him, as for Tom McDonald, the reaction to the news was swift and decisive.