The Stranger

Earlier my old roomie, who is currently in Seattle working for City Year, called me up. She was like "Hey Drea, my friend is gonna have 2 extra rooms in her apartment next year. We should move in there." and I was like, "Yeah, if I could find a job there!" And then she told me about The Stranger.

Dan Savage has a syndicated advice column called "Savage Love", it runs in Boston's Weekly Dig, where I interned over the summer. The column is so interesting because it's a gay man giving straight people advice.

Savage is the Editorial Director of The Stranger, looking at their site, they've got some great articles. It reminds me exactly of the The Dig which makes me love it. The whole sarcastic, young, alternative newsweekly thing.

I was reading Savage's feature this week, "In Defense of Dignity," and I was struck because it brought tears to my eyes. He is a great writer in my opinion. The article is about his mother dying of pulmunary fibrosis.

They gave my mother some more morphine—not enough to kill her, only enough to deaden the pain while her lungs finished her off. Still: Was she in pain? I'm haunted by the thought that she could have been in pain—the pain we promised to spare her—but had no way to tell us, no way to ask for more painkillers, no way to let us know that she needed us, that she needed our help, that she needed us to do whatever we could to hasten her inevitable death and end her suffering.

The story is really sort of heart wrenching, but a good read and a good argument for assisted suicide, if you call it that.