Former Washington state Gov. Booth Gardner had had Parkinson’s disease for over a decade when he joined a meeting of experts pushing for a new state law allowing physician-assisted suicide. Despite his tremor and difficulty speaking, Gardner set a confident tone. “He jabbed his thumb back over his shoulder with absolute authority and said, ‘We’re going to have a campaign, and I want you all to get in line behind me,’” remembered one attendee. “‘My goal is to lessen the pain of dying.’’’ Three years later, in 2008, Washington voters approved the Death With Dignity Act, which allows terminally ill patients to choose lethal medication.
Gardner was born in Tacoma to a socialite mother and an alcoholic father “who was cruel to his son,” said the Los Angeles Times. His parents divorced when he was 4, and his mother married Norton Clapp, who later headed the paper company Weyerhaeuser. When Gardner was a teenager, his mother and his sister were killed in a plane crash, “an event he later said ‘had a greater effect on me than anything else in my life.’”
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
Create an account with the same email registered to your subscription to unlock access.
-
India elections start amid violence, hate speech accusationsTalking Points Narendra Modi seeks a third term while critics worry about the future of the country's democracy
-
'Biden is smart to keep the border-security pressure on'Instant Opinion Opinion, comment and editorials of the day
-
Bird flu worries mount as virus found in milk, cowsSpeed Read The FDA found traces of the virus in pasteurized grocery store milk
-
Benjamin Zephaniah: trailblazing writer who 'took poetry everywhere'Why Everyone's Talking About Remembering the 'radical' wordsmith's 'wit and sense of mischief'
-
Shane MacGowan: the unruly former punk with a literary soulWhy Everyone's Talking About The Pogues frontman died aged 65
-
'Euphoria' star Angus Cloud dies at 25Speed Read
-
Legendary jazz and pop singer Tony Bennett dies at 96Speed Read
-
Martin Amis: literary wunderkind who ‘blazed like a rocket’feature Famed author, essayist and screenwriter died this week aged 73
-
Gordon Lightfoot, Canadian folk legend, is dead at 84Speed Read
-
Barry Humphries obituary: cerebral satirist who created Dame Edna Everagefeature Actor and comedian was best known as the monstrous Melbourne housewife and Sir Les Patterson
-
Mary Quant obituary: pioneering designer who created the 1960s lookfeature One of the most influential fashion designers of the 20th century remembered as the mother of the miniskirt
