In Fond Rememberance
This page is dedicated to the memory of our departed advocates. They include: Retired college professor and hospital administrator Ruth Ellen Lindenberg; A.A. “Bud” Smyser, long-time editor of the Honolulu Star-Bulletin; Folly Hofer, a retired Registered Nurse who gave much of her time and energy to the issue; Hawaii resident and nationally-known writer & advertising executive, Robert “Bob” Rees, and Dr. Ira Rohter, University of Hawai`i Professor of Political Science. All were early and constant advocates for Death With Dignity. Aloha dear friends! We surely miss your guidance and wisdom.
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All were saddened by the passing of another of our founding members, Ah Quon “AQ” McElrath in 2008. She would have not abided any grieving and we have provided the media stories here that indeed celebrate her long, admirable life.
Death With Dignity Communications Director Scott Foster (left) with the late Ah Quon McElrath, longtime advocate for working people, public health and the Death With Dignity movement in Hawaii. AQ was addressing a rally for striking nurses at Honolulu’s Thomas Square (2003). At the time, Foster was the Communications Director for the Hawai`i Nurses Association.
December 13, 2008
HONOLULU STAR-BULLETIN
Hawaii’s workers lose a stalwart champion The death Thursday of 92-year-old Ah Quon McElrath ended a lifetime dedicated to improving the quality of life for Hawaii’s working people. STORY NO LONGER AVAILABLE.
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December 13, 2008
HONOLULU ADVERTISER
Hawaii union, social activist Ah Quon McElrath dies at 92
She taught us to take risks, take care of others
By Christie Wilson
Advertiser Staff Writer
Ah Quon McElrath, who helped shape the history of labor and social justice in Hawai’i, died Thursday at Kaiser Moanalua Medical Center. She was 92.
McElrath had been ill with cancer and other ailments. Funeral arrangements have not been announced, but the family is planning private services, according to Joanne Kealoha of ILWU Local 142. The union will hold a celebration of life to honor McElrath to coincide with Jack Hall Day in February, she said.
McElrath was born in 1915 in Iwilei to Chinese immigrants.
After going to work in the pineapple cannery as age 13, McElrath graduated from the University of Hawai’i in 1938 and soon became a key figure with Local 152 of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union. Through the 1950s, the ILWU united sugar and dock workers of different ethnicities in an effort to fight for higher wages and work conditions.
McElrath took on the job as the union’s social worker, initially as a volunteer. She worked alongside two other ILWU legends, longtime regional director Jack Hall and information director Bob McElrath, whom she married in 1941. They had two children.
McElrath remained an activist for numerous causes throughout her life, prowling the halls of the Legislature to lobby for a wide range of causes including woman’s rights, healthcare and occupational safety concerns, educational opportunities, unemployment and disability insurance, gun control and physician-assisted suicide.
In 1995, McElrath was appointed to the University of Hawaii Board of Regents by Gov. Ben Cayetano and served until 2003.
Among the many awards and honors bestowed on her was the UH Founders Alumni Association Lifetime Achievement Award, for her leadership in advocating social change in education and improving social conditions throughout Hawai’i. She also was named a recipient of the 2004 Hooulu Award for leadership from the Hawaii Institute for Public Affairs.
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MIDWEEK
December 10, 2008
Voice for the people
Hawaii Would Not Be The Same Without Ah Quon Mcelrath, Social Worker, Labor Activist, Eloquent Advocate For The Common Man And Woman. Ah Quon McElrath describes herself as a “little Pake wahine.” But nobody who has ever heard her speak would use the diminutive. MORE
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December 16, 2008
HONOLULU ADVERTISER
EDITORIAL
Isles owe debt of aloha to Ah Quon McElrath
When Ah Quon McElrath made the last formal speech of her life Nov. 1, during a banquet in her honor hosted by the Hawai’i People’s Fund, her physical frailty was apparent while she was being helped up to the podium on stage.
But the clarity of voice and thought that resonated from the microphone reassured everyone in the hall that “A.Q.” still had the spirit that powered her through a life of leadership within the labor movement, and still maintained her support for the community’s poorest citizens.
Even the $1,000 honorarium paid to her after the fund’s dinner was returned in the mail with a note from the honoree, instructing the nonprofit’s leaders to use the money for its grants program.
McElrath, who died Thursday at 92, had retired in 1981 as a social worker for the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union. She was most famous for her pioneering work for unions during the sugar plantation and longshoremen’s strikes of the 1940s but persisted as an advocate for social justice causes to the end of her life.
In 1954 she became the union’s first social worker, counseling members on substance abuse, mental-health issues and other problems. She was a familiar face lobbying at the Legislature up until last year, and served as a University of Hawai’i regent until 2003.
McElrath could speak with authenticity for the poor because of her humble beginnings; she knew their struggles. Her own father died of a ruptured appendix at home in ‘Iwilei because the family had no money to pay for a doctor’s care.
And she could speak with eloquence because of her scholarship and the breadth of her experience. McElrath’s career had her witness the ravages of poverty far from Hawai’i's shores.
But the Islands remained her life’s focus, said civil rights activist Amy Agbayani, who cited A.Q.’s courageous advocacy for labor causes long before it was a popular stance.
“She always favored the side of the groups that had no voice,” Agbayani said.
A.Q.’s voice now will resonate through the beneficiaries of her life’s work. This champion of social justice has left a bright, indelible mark in Hawai’i's history.
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NOTE ON THE FOLLOWING: Long-time DwD advocate and founding member of the Hawai`i Death With Dignity Society Ruth Ellen Lindenberg died peacefully and unexpectedly in her sleep at 8 am on Friday May 7th, 2004, at the Nauna Lani Nursing Home in Honolulu where she had been recuperating from a minor health issue. She was a friend, teacher, mentor, and a feisty advocate for the downtrodden and her sage advice and counsel are greatly missed by the many who knew, worked with, and adored her. Her articles on health and human rights issues frequently appeared in local and national publications. – sf
Friday, March 12, 1999
HONOLULU STAR-BULLETIN
VIEWPOINT
Hawaii can’t keep ignoring topic of assisted death
By Ruth Ellen Lindenberg
IT takes a suicide to shake one up. We just had a double suicide in our condo. An elderly couple with serious and irreversible health problems took their lives recently. Admirable people whom I had known and respected for years, they lived on the next floor of my building. The man had been a respected physician, an orthopedist who in his day had put back together countless broken bodies. His civic-minded wife toiled in our election precinct to see that the best candidates were supported. She saw as her duty the need to work for community change. MORE
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NOTE ON THE FOLLOWING: The late A.A. Smyser (below right), was a member of Hawai`i Governor Ben Cayetano’s ground-breaking 1997 Blue Ribbon Panel On Living and Dying With Dignity and was a contributing editor to the Honolulu Star-Bulletin. Bud was one of Hawaii’s first Death With Dignity advocates to go public and the issue would never be the same. – sf
November 13, 1997
Honolulu Star-Bulletin
Hawaii’s World
Doctor-Assisted Death With Dignity
By A.A. Smyser
YOU haven’t yet heard of DADD for Doctor-Assisted Death With Dignity. It hasn’t been formed yet. But the editor of Hawaii Medical Journal, Dr. Norman Goldstein, may suggest it as an umbrella name for diverse national organizations advocating exactly that. He believes the DADD acronym could bring the movement recognition and success like that achieved by MADD for Mothers Against Drunk Driving. Goldstein won praise both nationally and locally for devoting the last December and March issues of the Hawaii Medical Journal to doctor-assisted death — probably the only medical journal in America to give it such intense attention. Copies went to medical libraries throughout the U.S. MORE
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NOTE: Death With Dignity Advocate Robert “Bob” Rees lost his battle with cancer in 2005. We miss his powerful voice and his long personal friendship. Read his obit and accolades Here. – sf
January 16, 2005
It is my right to die as I choose
By Robert M. Rees
A metastasized and malignant melanoma was removed from the lymph nodes of my left groin on Dec. 6. When the offending lump was excised, even I, under local anethesia, could offer an accurate diagnosis based on its discoloration from the pigment-producing skin cells — melanocytes — that caused it. The background noise switched abruptly from operating room banter to silence.
Poet Emily Dickinson, as she so often has, offered up insight:
I heard a fly buzz when I died;
The stillness round my form
Was like the stillness in the air
Between the heaves of storm.
A subsequent CAT scan revealed yet another lump in my right lung. And a biopsy traced it to the same virulent melanoma. All of this, of course, is about as close as you can come to a death sentence without appearing before a Texas judge. I may have anywhere from just a short time to a handful of years.
One of my first ruminations, as odd as it now seems, was on Ernest Becker’s classic Pulitzer Prize-winning book of 1973, “Denial of Death,” a study of the human inclination to spend a lifetime in denial of mortality by obsessing on self-importance. I imagined I was no longer in denial and had beaten Becker at his own game.
Becker turned out to be right. In short order, I developed an interest in the minutia of college football, in reruns of “Cheers” and in plowing through the New York Times “Guide to Essential Knowledge.” I became living proof of what my zoologist friend at Harvard, professor Edward Wilson, wrote in his book “Sociobiology: The New Synthesis”: “The human mind is a device for survival and reproduction, and reason is just one of its various techniques.”
But sooner or later, reality triumphs. The unique ability of humans to visualize the future is a two-edged sword. It was Ernest Hemingway’s protagonist in “A Farewell to Arms,” Catherine Barkley, who presciently said to her lover, “Sometimes I see myself dead in the rain.” When she dies, Lt. Henry leaves the hospital and walks back to the hotel in the rain.
One prepares for the storm. And among other things, depending on the ailment, one might want to have at hand the option of being able to terminate one’s own existence when the only alternative is a semi-comatose fight against intractable pain. The easiest and best way to secure this option would be to ask the physicians who have looked after me for a simple prescription to have on hand for when the alternatives narrow. But in Hawai’i, there is an obstacle to physician-assisted suicide. Thanks to our legislators, it is against state law for a doctor to write such a prescription.
America’s conservatives tend to accept as an article of faith economist Milton Friedman’s treatise called “Free to Choose.” These conservatives are happy to fight for the freedom to make mundane economic choices and yet want to deny anybody with a terminal illness the right to have at hand a medical prescription with which to end one’s own life at the time and place of one’s choosing.
They have forgotten U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson’s remarkable words in the midst of World War II when he determined that government may not compel the Pledge of Allegiance. “Freedom to differ,” wrote Jackson, “is not limited to things that do not matter much.”
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled on “Death with Dignity” in 1997 and concluded that due process of the U.S. Constitution does not include a generalized right to commit suicide. However, the court urged the states to reach their own conclusions on the narrower question of whether the terminally ill with intractable pain have a constitutionally based interest in controlling the circumstances of imminent death.
So far, Oregon is the only state to pass a Death with Dignity law. In spite of ongoing but failed attempts by the Bush administration to pre-empt Oregon’s law, it has been in effect for five years and apparently has been well received. In the August 2004 Journal of Clinical Ethics, Oregon’s Health Sciences University reported, “Death with Dignity is a safe, well-regulated option of last resort that improves end-of-life care for everyone.” The report noted that only 25 people per year exercise the option and concluded, “For many patients, simply knowing the option exists creates a climate of comfort.”
Legislation proposed for Hawai’i would do exactly what the court prescribed and what Oregon already does. In 2002, at the urging of Gov. Ben Cayetano and state Sen. Colleen Hanabusa, such a bill nearly passed. After approval on second reading in the state Senate, three senators changed their minds and succumbed to pressure from the Catholic Church, Hawai’i's Family Forum and others. One of the senators who voted no defended his vote by proffering that the state shouldn’t be involved in a life-and-death issue. This, of course, is a red herring, because by denying the option, the state of Hawai’i already is involved.
The Death with Dignity bill was introduced again last year but was withdrawn by the Democratic House leadership because they thought it lacked the necessary 26 votes. After all, the cynical thinking went, why take a close and controversial vote when a general election is imminent? This year, however, with commanding control of the state House and Senate, there is no excuse for the Democrats not to pass a Death with Dignity bill.
As for me, supported and loved by a marvelous wife, daughter and son — how truly lucky my life has been — I am planning on waging what I hope is a long, existential struggle of epic proportions. I hope to roll back the rock of Sisyphus hurled down by what, after all, is a tiny and random occurrence in the scheme of things.
Robert M. Rees is moderator of ‘Olelo Community Television’s “Counterpoint” and Hawai’i Public Radio’s “Talk of the Islands.” He wrote this article for The Advertiser.
