Be mindful of potential for insidious messaging about life or death

South Carolina author Josephine Humphreys recently posed a problematical question on Facebook: If you’re a doctor and you have 10 patients with coronavirus but can only save nine, who do you let die?

It is often the writer’s purpose to explore questions that are otherwise imponderable. William Styron broke the world’s heart with a similar question in his novel, “Sophie’s Choice.” Set in Nazi Germany, a mother, Sophie, was given a choice by her heartless captors: Which of her children would she allow to live?

Styron cuts so close to the bone that one wonders, why even think of such a thing? Because that’s what artists are compelled to do.

On a lighter note, novelist Christopher Buckley teased out the idea in “Boomsday” that, in light of Social Security trust fund shortfalls, baby boomers should kill themselves — a satirical idea that was embraced in the book and, now almost prophetically, seems to be taking hold in the swamp we call Washington, D.C.

Death is too much with us today. The U.S. now leads the world in the number of confirmed coronavirus cases. By the time I finish this column, more will have died of the plague we’ve come to know as COVID-19. As most of us have turned inward, staying inside our houses and keeping our distances elsewhere, we try to absorb the news that there aren’t enough masks for medical personnel or enough hospital beds and, most horrifying, ventilators for the number of patients who eventually will need them.

Suddenly, Humphreys’ question is not so strange.

With limited supplies of ventilators, who gets them and who does not?

More to the point, who doesn’t get one and dies as a result? Somebody makes that call. Which brings us back to Humphreys’ question and what seems the obvious answer — the elderly would be either denied more often than people who are younger, or at least asked, pretty please, might you be ready to go?

In recent days, there have been subtle and not-so-subtle nudges in that direction.

Most overt was the suggestion by Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick that many grandparents, apparently including Patrick himself, would rather die than allow social distancing to crush the economy. He told Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson that he’d rather take the risk of being infected by the coronavirus than have his grandchildren inherit an economic collapse.

“No one reached out to me and said, ‘As a senior citizen, are you willing to take a chance on your survival in exchange for keeping the America that all America loves for your children and grandchildren?’ ... If that is the exchange, I’m all in,” Patrick said.

The lieutenant governor claimed that he knew many others who feel just as he does about getting the country back to work, including Donald Trump, though it seems unlikely that the president would volunteer to die for anyone’s sake. Narcissism, not to mention the survival instinct, doesn’t work that way.

Meanwhile, I’ve been hearing a lot from doctors and others about “advance directives,” the documents by which healthy people create binding directives that detail their wishes for medical treatment should they become incapacitated and unable to speak for themselves.

Calvin Alexander, a critical care doctor in Shreveport, Louisiana, reported to me by email that he “not infrequently” treats critically ill elderly patients in intensive care who, ignorant of advance directives, opt out of ventilators and other life support once their options are explained.

By all means, let’s encourage thoughtful planning for end-oflife concerns. But let’s also beware insidious messaging that encourages our older citizens to sacrifice themselves for the young. After all, everyone eventually gets old, if we’re lucky.

And, to rephrase Humphreys’ question: Whose grandparents should die — yours or mine?