July 18, 2010 in City

The last word against cancer

His prognosis terminal, Dan Treecraft isn’t waiting for death to come to him

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Jan and Dan Treecraft share quality time at their Spokane home on June 27. Dan is suffering from tongue cancer and has decided to take his own life.
(Full-size photo)(All photos)

Sometimes he struggles with conversation. Droplets of spit, even blood, escape his mouth like wrong answers. He grimaces when swallowing.

He hates these moments, bringing a fist to his lips and looking away. He apologizes and then quickly leans close, eyes afire with a new thought, a new criticism of a medical system he sees as a greed-driven industry that is flipping off fate and getting rich doing it.

He frets over the idea of dying in a hospital, fed through a tube, dimmed by painkillers and hooked to machines. And the tests. Tests upon tests costing thousands of dollars that will confirm what he and everybody else already knows: Dan Treecraft, 61, is going to die.

Treecraft, relishing pastries at a local coffeehouse, cuts right to his point: “I’ve been told that 90 percent of Americans, when asked how they want to die, say they want to be at home, surrounded by family and friends. Instead 90 percent of Americans die in a hospital or institution, surrounded by strangers.”

“Not me,” he says, squinting as the early sun finds its way under the bill of his cap.

Treecraft is determined to take control.

Friends say goodbye

Diagnosed with tongue cancer last winter, Treecraft, who didn’t smoke or chew tobacco, was given six to 24 months to live.

He isn’t holding out for a miracle cure. He’s not even seeking treatment.

If he’s nervous about the coming day when he plans to slip a small mask over his mouth and nose and begin to breathe nitrogen gas, he doesn’t let on. If all goes according to plan, he will lose consciousness and die from asphyxiation. Perhaps this summer.

He has publicly embraced this choice.

In June he invited friends to a party – part roast and part wake.

“If people are going to party in my honor,” he said, “that’s a party I’m not going to miss.”

More than 120 showed. They brought dishes of food, and plates of desserts, cheese and fruit. There was beer and wine and some closely guarded fine liquor.

Most important, there were stories about Treecraft – some flattering, others embarrassing. Friends sang for him and a few read poems. Laughter and live music spilled from the party into the South Perry business district. Tears welled in the eyes of friends who hugged him tight.

It was everything Treecraft wanted: support, understanding and agreement.

What he can’t predict or control, however, is the toll on his wife, Jan.

At the very least he will not bankrupt her with unnecessary medical bills, Treecraft said.

He knows that his death will be easiest on him. He will be released from the pain and worry. She will be tasked with moving on.

“It’s so hard to stay focused on some inevitable day when Dan will die – most likely by his own hand,” Jan said. “We’re not there yet. I would like to live out what life we have left together.”

Treecraft said his greatest fear is that Jan may one day feel that he wasn’t fighting every day to stay alive to be with her.

“I never want her to perceive my death as a lack of caring for her.”

Asked how he would feel if their roles were reversed and Jan wanted to die, Treecraft shook his head. He didn’t have a good answer.

One of Treecraft’s friends at the wake was Dr. Ryan Holbrook, a surgical oncologist with Cancer Care Northwest.

He doesn’t agree with Treecraft’s plans, but he respects his friend’s choice.

“What I hope we can learn from Dan is this: We need to love, respect and honor the wishes of our loved ones,” Holbrook said.

Oftentimes patients and their families pull out all the stops. People who can’t bear the thought of their elderly parents dying subject them to treatments that keep them alive, though heavily sedated, and bed-bound for their final few months. “We don’t tend to see death as a normal thing that happens to all of us,” Holbrook said. “Maybe what we should be doing is providing comfort, and valuing their memories and stories.”

That may be easy to say and hard to do, acknowledged Holbrook, “because I have performed some major surgeries for people well into their 90s, and they are still going strong.”

Not seeking assisted suicide

Treecraft recognizes that his suicide will be controversial. It’s not illegal in the state of Washington. And voters a few years approved the Death with Dignity Act, allowing physicians to prescribe life-ending drugs.

Religious groups, notably the Catholic Church and its affiliated medical ministries such as hospital operator Providence Health Care, fought passage of the assisted suicide measure. Many church teachings consider suicide a serious sin. The Washington State Medical Association and its physician members were opposed.

Yet the measure passed handily, and last year 63 people received such drugs. The Washington State Department of Health reports 47 of them took the drugs and died.

Oregon and Montana also allow assisted suicide. The practice has been largely shunned in Spokane, where no hospitals allow it on their property. Doctors who may accept the idea privately worry about backlash.

Treecraft doesn’t want modern medicine playing a role in his death, so he’s not seeking help from a doctor.

Holbrook, who is not Treecraft’s doctor, did talk to his friend about tongue cancer and counseled him to listen to his physician. Palliative care has made big strides, and cancer patients don’t have to live in misery year after year.

But Treecraft is resolute, deciding six months ago he wouldn’t subscribe to the standard medical approach.

Tongue cancer is serious and relatively common. The Mayo Clinic reports that 10,000 Americans are diagnosed with tongue cancer every year. If caught early, it is curable. If not, it can be lethal.

In Dan’s case, it is considered terminal. Had Treecraft undergone surgery, it might have affected his speech and swallowing.

Now his treatment option is radiation therapy.

The chance of treatment providing a benefit to Treecraft has been 10 percent all along.

“This is a very difficult case,” said Holbrook. “With some cancers, a person gradually fades away. Tongue cancer is more symptomatic.”

Careful planning

Never a large man, Treecraft now weighs a wispy 125 pounds.

“Dan is getting to the point where it’s painful to swallow,” Holbrook said.

In an e-mail sent at 4:53 a.m. June 25, Treecraft wrote about the pain: “My tongue felt like it had been burned … like a sunburn. I thought about getting up & taking some pain pills. Realized, suddenly, something was leaking out the corner of my mouth, onto the pillow. Yikes! Mouthful of blood. Hard to relax when that’s happening.”

“These bleeding episodes rattle me. … This one has me spooked a bit. Makes me think my relatively slow glide into the ground might turn into a sudden nose dive, with no ability to pull out of it.”

A night later things had not improved.

“The cursed bleeding continues to harass me,” he wrote before sharing details of his suicide plan. “Yesterday’s peregrinations included a stop at an industrial compressed-gas supplier, to try to get started on the task of assembling a satisfactory ‘asphyxiation set-up’ (not a term found in the Yellow Pages index).”

He knows that talking of his suicide will be controversial. It only strengthens his resolve.

Two weeks ago he bought 20 cubic feet of nitrogen gas compressed into a metal cylinder about the size of a 2-liter pop bottle.

He tucked the cylinder under the seat of his scooter to bring it home.

“It’s a big day,” he said of his purchase.

Despite his careful planning – even including a videographer to record the death to protect Jan and others – authorities will be required by law to investigate Treecraft’s death, said Spokane County Medical Examiner Dr. John Howard. It will likely include an autopsy.

“I really wish he wouldn’t do it,” Howard said.

‘My time has passed’

By all accounts, Treecraft is driven, stubborn, unpredictable and passionate.

A fixture of Spokane’s left wing for years, he has criticized Spokane police at City Council meetings, written letters to the editor, and talks to anyone who listens about the dangers of big oil, big medicine and the threat posed to democracy by an apathetic public.

Friend Jim Schrock said Treecraft, who makes his living as an arborist, is “a great guest for a dinner party. He’ll make sure the conversation is never dull. And that it never stops.”

When he dies, Schrock said, the trees won’t sway with joy.

“He’s a tree trimmer who will try to talk you out of trimming your trees because trees should be left to be trees,” Schrock said.

He was born Daniel Whipple. His father was a Navy officer, bright and arrogant. His mother was a brilliant introvert, a champion debater who graduated from the University of North Carolina when she was just 18.

After his parents divorced when he was 8 years old, he moved with his mother to Seattle, where she met his future stepfather, Bob.

They lived together on Queen Anne Hill until one day a phone call changed everything: Bob’s estranged wife had been killed in a car accident. The three left their Seattle house and set up a new home with Bob’s children, who had been left without their mother.

Dan learned to adapt from being a 12-year-old only child to a member of a large family.

“One of the better things that have happened to me,” he said.

After high school he joined the Coast Guard, which included duty on an Antarctica icebreaker.

In 1971 he was busted for smoking pot on a South Florida beach and spent a day in the Broward County Jail. It was an experience that began shaping the young man and further challenged his politics, which had previously veered hard to the right. His views had been influenced by his father, whom Treecraft described as a John Birch Society member who celebrated the assassination of John F. Kennedy by purchasing the same sort of Italian rifle used by Lee Harvey Oswald.

To this day Treecraft believes everyone should be required to spend 24 hours in jail before they are allowed to vote.

“It would be a lesson in power. About who has it and how it’s abused,” he said.

Treecraft – who said his father eventually became disillusioned with the right wing – began embracing leftist politics after 1980 and has since dedicated much of his time and energy to protesting wars and conservative politicians, and supporting causes that challenge power.

He decided to change his name years ago to better reflect his work as an arborist.

He chose Dandelion Treecraft.

The name worked on Jan; the two met when Treecraft was working for one of her neighbors.

They married Sept. 22, 2001, at the home of Spokane artist Harold Balazs. The bride had written this poem:

Tree man up above

swings nimbly from limbs aloft

(why don’t you) come down

And see me (sometime)

His wife sees through the “grumpy leftist” moniker bestowed upon Treecraft at his party last month. She held him when friend Debbie Jackman sang their beloved “September Song.”

Though Treecraft is an atheist and self-described “doomer,” he speaks warmly of spirituality and hope. Contemplating his death for hours a day, week after week, has helped him put life in perspective, he said.

“My time has passed. And that’s OK with me,” he said. “Death is a natural part of life. … I am not afraid.”

11 comments on this story so far. Add yours!

• 

  eyecatch on July 18 at 8:00 a.m.

  My father-in-law died of incurable pancreatic cancer 16 years ago. He tried to stay home to the end, but still ended up dying in a hospital room - sometime he did not want. He knew that a system where everyone puts all their efforts into saving lives doesn’t have an easy time switching over to compassionately preparing those who are dying, as well as their friends and family, for accepting the end of life. Psychologically speaking it’s really hard for medical professionals trained to keep people alive at all costs to suddenly switch gears. I’m sure it takes a toll on them emotionally.

  When my father-in-law was born, it was a century ago, and these technologies did not exist. People were more accepting of death, because, frankly, their options of extending life were very limited. My grandfather suffered a horribly painful death from sepsis a short time before penicillin was discovered, leaving two small children behind, one of which was my mother.

  There are no easy answers to how we deal with our mortality in an age where billions of dollars are made by big Pharma and other interest groups profiting through the medical industry’s extremely successful lobbying efforts over the past 30 years. The spending is unsustainable. No one wants to recognize the implications, because it’s hard — really hard. Reality is cruel, but unavoidable.

  How do you ration it without pitting one interest group against another until we’re all tempted to hate one another because they got something we didn’t? Yet resources are finite. They always will be and more so in the years to come.

  I can really see this thing is already tearing us apart at the very seams of society, because our technology has vastly exceeded our capacity to offer it fairly for everyone, and also, made it difficult to determine an acceptable moment when it really is time to accept a person’s mortality.

  We need to accept reality. There is not enough money to extend a natural human life to the most outward limit using unlimited technology to do it. Dan Treecraft is accepting reality. He is dying of a terminal disease. If we had a better system that would provide end-of-life care in people’s homes and would provide palliative measures, then perhaps he wouldn’t have to make this choice. We should not judge him. We should learn from the revelation he gives us through his actions that such choices are pressed upon people because of the crazy health care system we have. It’s a system we have allowed to develop in a crazy-quilt fashion spurred on by a Wall Street with no concern for Main Street. Money IS a big factor in health care. It’s time to accept that fact instead of pretending, like we do with petroleum products, that the supply is endless.

  It’s not. My children - ages 13 to 26 - will never make enough money to pay the collective health care tab for Baby Boomers at the current rate of medical consumption in the last six months of life.

  Compassion, in the end, will not be measured by months of life, or the numbers of billions spent collectively at the end of life. It will be measured in the way it always has: loving one another, forgiving each other, spending time caring for one another, and never giving up the hope of eternal life.

• 

  monkeyman on July 18 at 9:58 p.m.

  “Give me Liberty, or give me Death!” - Patrick Henry, Virginia Convention, 1775.

  Death should be a choice.

• 

  Treecraft on July 18 at 11:21 p.m.

  Not that I think Lee Harvey Oswald had anything more to do with President Kennedy’s assassination than did my father (who went out and bought a rifle similar to the one Oswald was alleged to have used). Foolishness! Lee Oswald could not possibly have fired the shot that ripped the top of the president’s head off. Oswald was a convenient dupe. His executioner, Jack Ruby, helped make sure Oswald’s version of that day’s events were never heard.

  Dan Treecraft

• 

  Treecraft on July 19 at 12:42 a.m.

  While the overall content of Mr. Stucke’s article certainly is reasonably accurate, I might have made the emphasis on my own life-termination plans a bit less central to the story. Oh well - that’s a quibble - one takes one chances when he talks to a news-media reporter. Besides, life’s a moving target, after all, and I might feel differently tomorrow.

  There are several (mostly minor) erroneous factual details, which are - by my experience - to be expected. Nothing to call out for either retraction or apology, as I see it. I appreciate at least being accurately quoted.

  I dearly hope this story brings up a lot of serious conversation and thought among people who read it. That’s why I agreed most willingly to be involved in telling it. Each of us, our friends, our families, our communities - all need to take ultimate responsibility for our lives. Obviously, I believe that to the best of one’s ability, this should include the last days of our lives.

  Over the course of my life, I believe too many of us seem to have climbed onto a sort of medical-industrial conveyor belt, and have become rather dehumanized objects of attention by a medical-industrial-political-insurance complex that places fundamental human values (like personal integrity) at the bottom of it’s priority list. Doctors, nurses, technicians, medical machines…. all seem to have become tangled into a sort of monstrous machine that has gone completely off any humane, sensible course. Not always, perhaps, but terribly often.

  I hope my own audacious, willful, deliberate, public display of some independence encourages many others to consider taking more control of their own medical and mortal situations.
  That would be legacy enough for me.

  Good start, on adopting a perennial-orphan topic, John. My hat is off to the Spokesman’s editors for giving this some valuable ink and space. Thank you.

  Dan Treecraft

• 

  Lynne9 on July 19 at 5:30 a.m.

  I agree with what you are doing Dan.I have dementia but also have severe COPD which will kill me.I want NO heroics,machines feeding tubes period!

• 

  wellWisher on July 19 at 6:01 a.m.

  Godspeed, Dan. You share courage where it’s most needed.
  Best wishes to you both, and peace, and good memories to Jan.

• 

  MrNatural on July 19 at 8:14 a.m.

  Dan

  I find your decision practical and brave.
  I wish that your transition is pain-free and serene.

• 

  onthelist on July 19 at 2:58 p.m.

  I am a former neighbor and would like to say that we can all learn something from Dan. He has strong beliefs and they don’t waiver, which is apparent. I am amazed, dazed, impressed beyond words, respectful and in awe of this man. Anyone who takes the time to read this, pay attention and think about what is said here, will come out a better person. What he is teaching us is not relative to dying, but to living. What a legacy you have left Dan - I can only hope that you take me off your s– list :))).

• 

  Guy_McPherson on July 19 at 3:32 p.m.

  All in all, Dan, this is a well-done article. It makes you appear to be the brave, resolute, and rational man I know you to be. Nicely done, and best wishes in the months ahead.

• 

  JanTreecraft on July 20 at 11:03 a.m.

  I’m grateful on several counts here: To John Stucke and Kathy Plonka for the time spent in interveiwing, visiting and pulling all of this together - for taking care to get to know us, and for presenting painful and challenging truths; to Dan for taking this so utterly public - as an unintended result I (we) are surrounded with support from not only friends and family, but from complete strangers as well; and to those who have responded with their shared grief, shared stories, shared humanity, and particulary to those who have let us know how Dan’s story encouraged and empowered them in their own questioning journey. May these conversations ripple out, to move us as a society toward greater sanity, wisdom and compassion.

• 

  CapnK9 on August 02 at 11:53 a.m.

  Dan, at least you no longer have to worry about what you’re gonna be when you grow up.