THE FINAL CHOICE
HERE’S A STORY THAT WILL GIVE YOU A CHILL
He got a prescription for 50 pills — enough to kill himself. He survived. He’s worried others won’t.
The prescription slip is dated July 12, 1995. The paper is yellowed and faded, but the writing is still clear behind the plastic police evidence bag. It’s an order for a high-powered barbiturate notorious for its use in suicides.
Mark Jewitt had read how 40 pills would achieve “selfdeliverance.” He asked his doctor for 50.
Maurice Généreux’s criminal trial would later hear it was enough to kill two people.
“I can’t know what these are for,” Jewitt remembers Généreux telling him as the doctor scrawled on his prescription pad.
“I told him, ‘ You don’t have to.’ And he just wrote it out and handed it to me.”
Two days later, Jewitt took the prescription to his neighbourhood drugstore, waited as the pharmacist counted out the white capsules, then returned home to his Toronto apartment. It was scorching hot; news stories the next day reported a record 37C that afternoon.
But Jewitt wouldn’t know that. By then, he would be in a coma.
Jewitt had been diagnosed with HIV in 1988. By the time his prescription was written, he wanted to die.
Instead, he survived, and made medical history when Généreux became the first doctor in Canada to be convicted for assisting suicide.
Généreux was charged, and pleaded guilty, to two counts — one for Jewitt, who the justice said was “lucky to be alive,” the other for Aaron McGinn, who ended his life in April 1996.
Jewitt, now 59, has not spoken publicly about the case in nearly two decades. But he has agreed to an exclusive interview with the National Post because of his deep concerns as legislators race to craft a new federal assisted death law.
He recalls that his appointment with the doctor took only two minutes. “He didn’t ask me, ‘ Are there any problems? He didn’t ask, ‘ What are you feeling, emotionally?’ ”
Jewitt worries that as the country prepares for legali zed assisted dying, any death wish might be granted.
He knows those wishes can change.
Jewitt first met Généreux in 1988, the year he tested positive for HIV. The doctor called him at work to give him his diagnosis.
Jewitt had been working as a public information officer in the legal community. He says he was advised to quit, put his financial affairs in order and buy a burial plot. He was 32.
Today, he is dressed neatly in jeans and a cotton checked shirt; his once curly dark hair is now silver and cropped short. Jewitt says he is in “excellent” health other than “killing myself with smoking.”
He says he knew he was gay when he was a boy. Raised in small- town Ontario, “I was the nerd. The queer,” he says, until he moved to Toronto at 17.
But by the late 1980s, HIV was sweeping through the city’s gay community. Jewitt has lost two longtime partners to AIDS. By his estimate, the disease has also killed 47 of his friends.
“The bars were full of people with HIV. They had lost their jobs. They had nowhere to go. And they were dropping like flies,” he says.
Jewitt’s case was different. He didn’t have all the standard symptoms. He now knows “I’m what you call a type of elite controller,” he says, as we talk at a small table in his apartment.
Jewitt has had HIV- related illnesses over the years, though. The first was in the late 1980s when he developed folliculitis, an extremely itchy rash that often occurs before any other sign or symptom of the virus. He remembers scratching himself so raw he ended up in emergency. Welts formed on his back.
He was sharing a house with four other roommates.
“One of the guys said, ‘I’ve got a really good gay doctor. His name is Maurice Généreux,’ ” Jewitt recalls.
Jewitt trusted his new doctor. “I liked him a lot. He was such a nice guy — very easygoing.” He called him Maurice. He had his home phone number. He became dependent on Généreux for Valium and Percocet, pills for pain, depression and sleep.
Then, in June 1993, Jewitt’s first partner to have AIDS “went into the hospital and spent 10 days dying.” He was skeletal, emaciated from wasting syndrome. His hair was falling out; he was almost blind. Jewitt remembers the terror of watching his partner sitting up and struggling to breathe.
“He asked me to please help him die. He asked me to turn up the morphine. And I couldn’t do it. I told him, ‘I can’t kill someone I love.’
“Of course I was crying, because he wanted to die, and he wanted to die badly.”
Jewitt became obsessed with suffering the same fate.
By 1995 he had still not crossed over into full- blown AIDS. Though he had what one expert would describe as a “modestly lowered” CD4 count — the immune cells attacked by HIV — he had no “AIDS-defining” illnesses.
“Far from being terminally ill with HIV,” Dr. Philip Hébert, now a professor emeritus in the department of family and community medicine at the University of Toronto, wrote in a report prepared for Généreux’s sentencing appeal, “he was physically, at least, quite well.”
But Jewitt was in a profound depression. He was lonely, struggling financially, eating too little and drinking too much ( he had stopped drinking years before). He was also frightened of taking the early AIDS drugs, which were once given in such massive doses people would black out, or suffer memory loss or damage to their internal organs.
“I thought, enough of this. It’s not going to get any better. Let’s just go,” Jewitt says.
“Then I went down to see Généreux.”
Before he took his pills, Jewitt placed Derek Humphreys’ book, Final Exit, on the coffee table, with a note. “I’m sad to do this,” he remembers writing. “But I’m leaving this note because I don’t want anyone to think this is a murder.”
He then took the pills, two by two, and lay down on the couch.
Several hours later a friend found him, slurring his words and not making sense. Jewitt confessed he had taken some pills, then passed out.
He remembers waking briefly in hospital. The Kent State University T- shirt he was wearing had been cut open. A nurse was wiping hi m down, s miling: “I thought she was my mother.”
He lapsed into a coma and wouldn’t wake up for five days.
His half- brother testified when he called Généreux to tell him Jewitt was in the hospital, the doctor responded, “Oh, is he dead yet?”
HIS APPOINTMENT WITH THE DOCTOR TOOK ONLY TWO MINUTES. “HE DIDN’T ASK ME, ‘ARE THERE ANY PROBLEMS?’ HE DIDN’T ASK, ‘WHAT ARE YOU FEELING EMOTIONALLY?’
Jewitt was allowed into the Toronto courtroom during Généreux’s sentencing hearing only twice — to testify and again for the sentencing.
At first, Jewitt said the suicide attempt was his fault. He did not blame Généreux. “I was trying to help him. I still had this thing that this was my friend. That this was horrible what was happening to him.”
Then Généreux pleaded guilty to assisting Jewitt in his suicide attempt, as well as helping McGinn.
“That was the biggest shock to me,” Jewitt says.
Généreux was ultimately sentenced to two years less a day. He spent nine months in jail.
The trial judge, in handi ng down a sentence he would describe as one of the most difficult in his 20 years on the bench, not only spoke about Généreux’s prescriptions, but also noted his patients were depressed and had mental problems.
According to a pre- trial conference memorandum in a lawsuit Jewitt would later bring, Généreux’s notes recorded his flagging mental health as early as June 1989. There were references describing his as “severely depressed,” “very depressed” and “looking anxious and depressed.”
Jewitt sought counselling after his suicide attempt. AIDS treatments also changed radically not long after he took those pills. He started treatment in 1997.
“I can go years without taking the pills, and I won’t get sick. And then, after about eight years, I’ ll show signs of HIV.”
He says he would have missed “so much” had he died. “I would have missed gay marriages. I would have missed AIDS becoming a manageable disease.”
Still, Jewitt lives a private life. He declined to be photographed. “I don’t want my picture out there. You don’t understand — it’s AIDS still. It’s like, ‘ You’re still alive?’”
He has trouble trusting anyone. The police investigation and media attention were emotionally draining.
“Nobody said I could just step away from it. Nobody said, ‘ Mark you can j ust leave and not say a word.’ I thought I was duty- bound to do this. I would have preferred not to do it. But I said I was going to tell the truth. And I did.”
Two decades after he was thrust into the headlines, Jewitt would prefer to bury the past, pushing it away the same way he keeps a halfmetre- high stack of court documents and press clippings in a box at the back of his closet. When he lifts it, the bottom collapses.
But he worries about legalized assisted deaths in Canada happening in secret, of the boundaries and criteria expanding to include more and more people. He supports it in cases of devastating illnesses such as ALS, but he was horrified after a parliamentary committee last week advised extending doctor-assisted death to mature children and the mentally ill.
“I think a lot of stuff is just going to disappear,” Jewitt says. “Where is courage going to go? Where is bravery going to go?
“I believe through experience, and through watching my friends die, that at the end, there is a grace. There’s a time that it doesn’t hurt any more.”