Closure.org Blog

By Jonathan Weinkle, MD

Joe Klein has spent most of his adult life on the presidential campaign trail, reporting for Time magazine on presidential politics.  He asks hard questions and provides sharp analysis of both Democratic and Republican candidates.  One wonders if, in 2012, he will have a new, difficult question to ask, born of his recent personal experiences.

Klein’s parents recently died, each of them after the long series of illnesses that typifies how older Americans die in this day and age.  His mother succumbed to pneumonia in the end, and his father to kidney failure.  In a recently published Time cover story and accompanying video, he discusses the experience.

Nothing Klein says will be news to anyone who has recently experienced the death of an older loved one.  Procedures were done, like repeated lab draws and placement of a feeding tube, that did not add length of life, but did add to the burden of suffering.  The feeding tube was placed because when the doctor in Pennsylvania called Klein in Chuck Grassley’s kitchen in Iowa and said, “We have to put in a feeding tube or we’ll lose her,” he felt like he didn’t really have a choice at that time.  The whole truth of how soon Mrs. Klein was likely to die didn’t come out until after the time was already in.