San Francisco Chronicle - Monday, October 19, 1992
Lori Olszewski, Chronicle Staff Writer

Today, beginning a two-part series on the euthanasia movement in the United States, The Chronicle documents the decision of a person with AIDS to end his life with the help of a friend.

Tomorrow, the series will discuss Proposition 161, which would legalize "physician aid in dying." The series will also look at hospice care, which many view as a preferrred alternative to euthanasia.

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The hot afternoon sun streamed into the Twin Peaks apartment, but Steven Shiflett covered his lap with an afghan to ward off a chill only he could feel. Steven, three months short of his 40th birthday, was dying from AIDS.

Within a few hours, as Good Friday turned into Saturday, Steven was dead -- not of his disease but from six lethal injections administered at his request by a friend reluctantly turned mercy killer. The friend had gone to Steven's apartment to say good-by, not to commit a felony.

When the drugs stopped Steven's heart one minute before midnight, Mr. and Mrs. Wendell Shiflett lost their only son and first-born child. Six little boys in Mississippi and Louisiana lost their uncle. And the Texas gay rights movement lost one of its heroes.

"Know that I have gone to where I have been wanting and I am not afraid," Steven said in an April 17 letter to his family. His pain was over. He was freed from the bacteria that ravaged his intestines. The small brown refrigerator rented solely to hold his AIDS medication could be shipped back to its supplier. He no longer needed the humiliating diapers and intravenous lines that tied him to his apartment.

THE JOURNEY

There are many ways to describe the way Steven died.

The right-to-die movement would call it an assisted suicide. The right-to-life movement would call it murder. The state of California would label it a felony.

Steven liked to describe the way he chose to die as "My Journey Into the Bright World."

But the actual trip on that night in April did not match the death Steven imagined for himself when he knelt before a closet and dragged out a brown box with the words "euthanasia kit" carelessly scrawled across the side in black magic marker.

He held up the vials of drugs he had been stockpiling to execute his "program." He pulled out a brown plastic garbage bag he planned to put over his head if the drugs failed to do the job. And he talked matter-of-factly about how he chose the drug that would kill him after researching the operation of Dr. Jack Kevorkian's suicide machine in Michigan and reading Derek Humphry's book, "Final Exit."

"I differentiate between suicide and euthanasia. Suicide is an end, a black hole, an escape," Steven said in an interview. "That is not my attitude toward euthanasia. Euthanasia's a process of transforming myself into the next world. I want to celebrate my death as I would my birth."

Two months later, the day he had chosen for death started out according to plan. Steven's bed was made with fresh sheets printed with a geometric pattern of bold, primary colors. The house was adorned with vases of fresh flowers, including the yellow daffodils that transported Steven back to his Southern childhood. A platter on the glass dining-room table offered goat cheese and sun-dried tomatoes for the menagerie of guests who had been invited to the house for one last visit.

That was before the man Steven had asked to help him die started drinking screwdrivers that were heavy on the vodka. 4:30 P.M. -- THE WAKE

Steven had planned a small party with perhaps six guests, but he rarely did anything small. In 1978, when he was elected president of the Gay Political Caucus in Houston, he chose the Houston Astrodome as the site of a historic town meeting for the Texas gay community. Four thousand people showed up.

So no one was too surprised when his living room overflowed with guests. Always the gentleman, Steven had sent out hand-written invitations to his wake. "He's such a Southern belle at heart," whispered a friend, Troy.

The nervous quiet of the early arrivals soon gave way to the boisterous clamor of a yuppie cocktail party, but with one key difference: The guests would never see their host again.

"I could have had the usual wake and you could all come look at the body, but I didn't want to miss a good party," Steven said, seated in a corner chair with all eyes upon him. The terminally ill Steven of the past few weeks, the one so weak he could barely make one of his constant trips to the bathroom, had disappeared for the benefit of his friends. The "people-pleasing" Steven, as he often referred to himself, the one of the barbed wit and arched brow, had come back for one last show.

No one could tell that when Steven's disease-ridden eyes looked at them, all he saw were blurred faces. They did not know that a few days before, he had been reduced to swallowing a teaspoon of olive oil periodically in an attempt to avoid starvation, because his broken body had stopped absorbing nutrients through an intravenous line.

"I drip and I shit. That is my life now," said Steven a week before he died. "I've stayed much longer than I planned."

HIS FAVORITE TIME

Most of the audience for this final appearance was from the last period of his life, his eight years in San Francisco. It was not his favorite time.

That distinction belonged to 1975-83 and Houston, Texas, his native state, where he returned after graduating from Louisiana State University with a major in marketing. No matter how sick Steven was, he sat up a little straighter and his eyes shone when he talked about Houston. Although he made his living as a salesman, his passion was politics, and he had made Houston's Gay Political Caucus an influential force. When he left Texas at the end of 1983 for San Francisco, Kathryn Whitmire, then mayor of Houston, declared a "Steven Shiflett Day." The framed certificate was beside his bed on the night he died.

"I can be narcissistic, and I got off on the power," Steven said. "That contributed to my fall from grace."

The petty backbiting that divided Houston's gay community eight years before seemed very far away as the sun set and his friends raised their glasses in a final toast on April 17.

"You are one of the most unique persons I ever met," said one his friends as everyone in the room rose. "You will never be forgotten.

"To Steve."

It would have been the perfect Hallmark moment -- except for one thing. People were trying not to notice that one of the guests, the man who had agreed to assist Steven with his death, was drunk and sobbing in a chair. To break the tension, Steven called out to the crying man, "Please don't pass out."

Steven thought he had planned every detail surrounding his death, but this was one he had not anticipated.

GOOD-BYS

People die as they live, and Steven lived in charge. The eldest of four children, he admitted to being a bit bossy. That side of Steven, the big brother to three little sisters, emerged as he announced to his guests that the time for emotion was over.

"I have a time line. It's late. Everyone was supposed to leave at 8 p.m., but it is quite past that," he said as he stood up and began to clear the wine glasses left about the room. His friends laughed at how typical it was for Steven, always the perfect host, to clean up at his own wake.

A few days earlier, Steven had observed, "You have to be considerate about how you leave. My friends and I are becoming quite experienced at this."

As he talked, he looked at the many photographs on the white desk in his bedroom. Except for his nephews and sisters, everyone in the pictures was dead from AIDS.

"Give them hell wherever you're going," said Steven's friend, Lovie, as he headed for the door.

Lin, whom Steven met when he was a sales representative for commercial office furnishings in San Francisco, gently placed her hand over Steven's heart. "Please send me a girlfriend," she whispered.

"I don't know if I remember all your requirements," Steven said and smiled.

"Where you're going, you'll know," she said.

For Steven, the good-bys on the evening of his death were not his most difficult. He had already shed his most painful tears at leaving a life half-lived a month earlier in Louisiana with his family. That was when he decided to set his euthanasia date.

"I had to come home to get ready to die," Steven said at that time. "For the first time, I really believe it; I am dying. I feel like they are letting go of me, they are giving me the freedom to leave."

His father knew it was his son's last visit.

"What a waste of a young life," Wendell Shiflett said, tears brimming in his eyes. He was in his study, a room filled with photograph albums of his three daughters and son.

His sister, Sandi Wilson, said, "For me, Steve is the one who hung the moon. When my first son, Scott, was born, Steven drove all the way from Texas to help me take care of him. How many brothers do that?"

As the weekend ended, Steven did not want to say good-by to his sister from his sick bed. He pulled on some clothes and walked to the driveway for what he knew would be his last look at Sandi and her sons.

After Sandi backed the van out of the driveway, Steven sat on his mother's living room couch and sobbed. At that moment, he knew he would never celebrate his 40th birthday.

Twenty-six days later, only one member of his family, another sister, attended the wake in San Francisco. She was the sibling who shared Steven's red hair.

"I feel close to Steven, but I don't feel like I really know him because he was 11 years older," she said. "I was about 7 when he went away to college, so we didn't overlap much. We got to know each other more as adults. Mostly, I remember him playing the piano, a big green piano."

She had flown across the country to make sure her brother's wishes were honored. The wish Steven had expressed repeatedly about his death was that he wanted to be asleep when the fatal drugs were injected; that was why he needed someone to assist and why he could not do it himself.

'MY SURROGATE'

"My surrogate" is how Steven talked about the person appointed to help him -- the man who had been drinking screwdrivers as the crucial hour approached. Before that evening, he seemed to be the perfect candidate. He was infected with the AIDS virus himself. And he spoke confidently of how he had helped four other AIDS patients die, smothering one by holding his hand over his mouth and pinching his nose.

"I am not a pillow for hire," the surrogate said, tears rolling down his face as he recalled the other times he had helped people die. "I wouldn't do this for everyone, for a stranger. The man I assisted had begged me to die. His lover and sister asked me to help. He had severe dementia, and he was constantly screaming about the police coming through the ceiling. The more anguish you see someone in, the easier it is to let them go."

But when Steven's apartment emptied out April 17 and the moment of truth approached, the surrogate's commitment had been weakened by alcohol and feelings that Steven was not honoring his part of the bargain.

"There were way too many people there who knew my role in the plan. It was supposed to be a small gathering, and it turned into a circus," he said later. "They were Steven's friends, not my friends. I felt like I was putting my freedom on the line. I didn't want to spend the end of my life in prison on an HIV ward. Plus, I was very drunk, and you know how that skews everything."

Adding to the brewing tension, other things were not going right either. Steven had consumed a large number of sleeping pills and morphine, but he was not dozing off. His digestive system was not working, so his body was not absorbing the drugs. It was more than an hour past the time he had chosen for his death.

THE COLLAPSE

That is when things really fell apart. Someone walked into Steven's bedroom and saw the surrogate injecting Steven. Whatever was said, the surrogate grabbed his bag and ran down Twin Peaks and caught the Number 37 bus, abandoning Steven in the midst of an "assisted suicide."

The others in the apartment faced the moral dilemma of their lives. "I was thinking, 'Oh my God, what does half a dose do?' Does it give someone half a heart attack?" said one of the people left in the apartment.

Panicked, one of them called a doctor who knew of Steven's intentions.

"I didn't expect that phone call," the doctor said. "I was expecting to hear Steven died peacefully. Instead, Steven's awake with an unspecified amount of drugs in him. I had seen a few botched jobs, and they are not pretty."

The doctor had to make a decision. "I decided to go with the patient's wishes."

In the process, everyone discovered that the fastidious Steven, the man who always dotted his i's and crossed his t's, had misunderstood the fatal dose. Despite his research, Steven had instructed his surrogate to inject him with less of the drug than was necessary.

"Steven had been very clear with me about what he wanted," the doctor said, "so I told them how to finish what had been started. It crossed the line for me; I was involved way more than I wanted to be. It should have remained just between Steve and me.

"When I hung up the phone, I thought, 'Oh my God, I just helped kill somebody.' But Steven was going to be dead in a week or two. Steven was looking to shorten his death, not to shorten his life."

While the doctor struggled with one ethical dilemma, the guests left behind had another. They had to decide who would actually end Steven's life by injecting the rest of the drugs.

"I don't worry if it was right or wrong. It was what he wanted," said the friend who finished what had been started. "What were we going to do? Abort the whole thing in the middle? I didn't choose it, but I have no lingering morality questions about it."

EPILOGUE

As Steven was dying, the man who ran from the scene was riding BART back and forth from Daly City to San Francisco, staring through his tears out the window.

"I am so ashamed," he said later. Within three months, he had packed up and left San Francisco. "There are too many ghosts for me here," he said the day before he moved. "Everyone I knew here is dead or dying."

The summer fog was on its way into San Francisco as the friend who had to administer the last injections remembered the spring evening when he ended Steven's life.

"I expected it to be like putting a dog to sleep, where you just give the injection and they go right out. But it went on and on."

"After what I have been through, I will vote for the initiative on the ballot in November so a doctor could be there." At 1 a.m. on the Saturday after Steven's death, the funeral home picked up his body and took it to Mount Zion Hospital, where Steven had arranged to donate his eyes to a research project.

His earthly remains were cremated, and the city record of his death lists AIDS and its related infections as the cause.

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