Most people only remember the label: “Dr. Death.” The media ran with it, latched onto it, and turned a complex human being into a headline that sold papers and fear in equal measure. But revisiting my 2011 interview with Dr. Jack Kevorkian, recorded in the same year he died, I heard a man who wasn’t courting controversy. I heard clarity. Humanity. Immense compassion.

And maybe I hear it even more clearly now because of everything I’ve lived through.

The past year and a half has pushed me through levels of emotional, physical, and psychological exhaustion I never imagined possible. When life piles on trauma after trauma, and the people and institutions you trusted fail you, the idea of simply being done crosses your mind. Not dramatically. Not with panic. More like a whispered acknowledgment that suffering can stretch a person to the edge of what is humanly bearable.

I say this openly because I’ve been closer to death than most people will ever come. I know the feeling. I remember lying there, the blood loss, the shock, the quiet internal acceptance. My mind genuinely believed those were my final breaths.

And here is what surprised me: It wasn’t terrifying. It was beautiful. Intense. Still. A calm unlike anything I had ever experienced.

That moment didn’t make me wish for death, but it showed me why someone in unending pain might crave peace. It made me understand, on a level I never could have before, exactly what Kevorkian meant by mercy.

The Man Behind the Macabre Moniker

To understand Kevorkian, you have to strip away the caricature the 24-hour news cycle built in the 1990s. They painted him as a ghoul obsessed with mortality. And to be fair, he didn’t help his own case with his early eccentricities. This was a man who, as a pathology resident in 1958, proposed that death row inmates be allowed to undergo medical experimentation under anesthesia before execution. He called it a chance for them to contribute to humanity one last time. The medical establishment called it barbaric and ejected him from the University of Michigan residency program.

In our interview, Kevorkian dismantled the misinformation piece by piece. He talked about how people fear death so much that they can’t hold the conversation without moral panic. They cling to doctrine instead of compassion. They judge instead of listening.

The Machines: Engineering the Exit

One of the most misunderstood aspects of Kevorkian’s work was the methodology. The media treated his devices like torture instruments, but they were actually feats of desperate engineering designed to give control back to the patient. Kevorkian realized early on that for a death to be dignified, it had to be self-determined. The doctor could not be the executioner; the patient had to be the agent of their own release.

First came the Thanatron (Greek for “instrument of death”). It was a simple, brilliant assembly of three bottles and an IV line. The process was automated but triggered by the patient. First, a saline drip. Then, the patient pushed a button to release sodium thiopental, a barbiturate that induced a deep, coma-like sleep within sixty seconds. Finally, a timer clicked over, releasing potassium chloride to stop the heart and pancuronium bromide to prevent spasms. It was clinical. It was peaceful. It was medical.

But when the state of Michigan revoked his medical license in 1991 following the death of Janet Adkins, Kevorkian could no longer legally obtain the controlled substances required for the Thanatron. A lesser man might have stopped. Kevorkian improvised.

He built the Mercitron. This device used a canister of carbon monoxide and a mask. It was cruder, yes, but it served the same function. The patient would turn a valve (or remove a clip) to start the flow of gas. It was a clear shift from the clinical to the practical, a gritty acknowledgment that the law would not stop the suffering, so the law would not stop the relief.

The Janet Adkins Precedent: Defining Dignity Early

Kevorkian’s patients weren’t confused. They weren’t impulsive. They were suffering deeply and profoundly, trying to reclaim some dignity from the slow unraveling of their lives. Take Janet Adkins, his first public patient in 1990. She was 54 years old, an active woman who loved tennis and piano, but she had been diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s. She saw the cliff approaching. She knew that soon she would no longer recognize her husband, her sons, or herself.

Critics screamed that she wasn’t “sick enough” because she could still play tennis. They missed the point entirely. Adkins didn’t want to die because she was in physical pain; she wanted to die because the destruction of her mind was a fate she refused to endure. She chose to leave the party while she still knew her name.

She died in Kevorkian’s 1968 Volkswagen van in a campground, not because Kevorkian wanted it to be seedy, but because no hospital, hospice, or clinic would allow her the dignity of a sterile room. That image, the rusty van in the woods, became a symbol of the system’s failure, not Kevorkian’s malice.

The Thomas Youk Turning Point: A Deliberate Provocation

For years, Kevorkian walked a legal tightrope. He assisted over 130 people, but he always ensured the patient took the final action. He was acquitted in three separate trials because juries looked at the suffering of the patients and refused to call it murder.

But in 1998, Kevorkian decided to force the issue. He met Thomas Youk, a 52-year-old man in the final, agonizing stages of ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease). Youk was terrified of choking on his own saliva. He had lost the use of his arms and legs. He physically could not push a button or turn a valve.

Kevorkian made a choice. He videotaped himself administering the lethal injection directly. This wasn’t assisted suicide anymore; it was active euthanasia. He sent the tape to 60 Minutes. He wanted a trial. He wanted the highest court in the land to rule on whether a physician had the right to end the suffering of a patient who could not do it themselves.

It was a gamble, and he lost. The judge refused to allow the jury to hear testimony about Youk’s pain or his consent. The case was stripped of its context and reduced to a technicality: a man injected another man with poison. Kevorkian was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to 10 to 25 years in prison.

The AMA vs. Reality: The Ethics of Abandonment

But that obsession wasn’t rooted in sadism. It was rooted in a hyper-rational, almost surgical view of death as a biological inevitability rather than a mystical taboo. Kevorkian was a jazz musician, a composer, and an oil painter who created works like “The Gourmet (War)” visceral, disturbing pieces that forced viewers to look at the grim reality of the human condition. He wasn’t hiding from the dark; he was staring directly into it.

Kevorkian’s fiercest critics were often his own peers. The American Medical Association (AMA) held a hard line: “Physician-assisted suicide is fundamentally incompatible with the physician’s role as healer.” They argued that doctors must preserve life at all costs.

Kevorkian argued that this was cowardice. He believed the highest role of a doctor was to alleviate suffering. If a patient was terminal, in agony, and begging for release, forcing them to stay alive was not healing; it was torture. He viewed the medical establishment’s refusal to engage as a form of abandonment. They would drug patients into a stupor, hook them to machines, and bill the insurance companies for every extra day of misery, but they would not offer the one thing the patient actually asked for: an exit.

Listening back to our interview, I realize his philosophy mirrored something I have been learning the hard way: Suffering isn’t always visible. But it is always real. And sometimes recognizing that, and not looking away, is the highest form of compassion.

The Silence at the Edge: My Own Brush with the Void

Kevorkian told me about the peace he saw in his patients when they finally knew they had control. The fear evaporated. The panic subsided. When you know you have an out, the room stops spinning.

That story, paired with my own brush with death, hits differently now. Because I know how quiet and peaceful the edge can feel. I know why someone might choose not to spend years spiraling into a reality that no longer resembles themselves.

When I was lying there, bleeding, believing I was dying, I didn’t feel fear. I felt a profound stillness. It wasn’t a void of nothingness; it was a void of noise. The constant static of life, the trauma, the betrayal, the stress, it all just stopped. It was the most restful moment of my life.

That doesn’t mean I am suicidal. It means I understand the allure of the silence. For Thomas Youk, choking for air, that silence was a gift. For Janet Adkins, facing the erasure of her memories, that silence was a sanctuary.

Legacy: The Battering Ram of Progress

Kevorkian was a battering ram. He broke the door down so others could walk through. He wasn’t a showman for the sake of fame; he was a showman because he knew the world ignored polite requests. He forced America to look at the ugly, messy reality of death.

And history is slowly catching up to him. Today, Medical Aid in Dying (MAID) is legal in ten states and Washington, D.C. Millions of Americans now have the right to do exactly what Kevorkian went to prison for: ask a doctor for a prescription to end their life on their own terms. We don’t call it “Dr. Death” anymore. We call it “Death with Dignity.” We call it “End of Life Options.”

We sanitized the language, but the mechanism is the same. Kevorkian’s conviction wasn’t that death is good, but that unending suffering is not a moral requirement.

A Conversation We Still Need

This interview isn’t just an artifact from 2011. It is a mirror held up to a conversation society is still too afraid to have. You can judge Kevorkian by the label. Or you can judge him by the compassion he offered to the suffering.

After surviving a moment where my own life nearly slipped away, after feeling that peaceful, quiet acceptance that comes at the edge, I believe the world owes this conversation more honesty.

Some people don’t want to die. They just want the suffering to stop. And sometimes the greatest mercy we can offer someone is the right to choose peace. That is not darkness. That is dignity. And maybe it is time more people understood it that way.