Do I kill my father?

I was standing with the doctor in the kitchen of my father's house, leaning against the stove, staring at the big moths and butterflies framed and mounted on the kitchen wall. It was a sweet July morning, the kind when my father would have been sitting in a lawn chair outside, reading the paper, greeting his neighbors. I was a thousand miles from home, and I missed my children.

"Would you like me to do something?" the doctor asked me. "Is it time?"

This should have been an easy decision. My father and his doctor were longtime friends and companions. On wintry evenings, they stayed up late, two scientists, and talked about right and wrong, about life, about death. These were Depression-raised problem solvers. If they were dying in pain, they wanted the dying to be quick, and then everyone could get on to other things. So the doctor and I were both pretty sure we knew what my father wanted.

And it clearly was time. My father's body was dying faster than he was. We couldn't roll him over in bed without leaving appalling dents in his thighs; his lips moved sometimes, but we couldn't make out any words; his eyes never opened; he breathed in loud whispers, and sometimes seemed to sob. There was no question that he was in pain, a pain the doctor could not end.

But I could. I could say one word, yes, and my father's best friend would kill him. My children and husband would come and I would get to go home. I have never been so lonely in my life. If I said yes, my sisters would land at the airport and I would be there to meet them and we would hug and cry and say how good it was that the pain was over, that this is what Dad would have wanted. And then we would organize things in the house; we are good organizers. We wouldn't talk about how he died. His friends would bring casserole dishes, and my aunt would bring a ham, and we would say good-by to them with hugs and some little memento.

If I say yes, what will my father think? Will he think, I knew I could trust her to figure out what is right and do it without flinching? She always was my problem-solver, and she came through in the end. Will he be proud of me? His pride has motivated me all my life.

Will he protest? But I was still alive. I could hear the children coming home from school. I could follow the leafy paths of my thoughts. I was remembering a picnic spread along a fallen log, and my daughter killed me. My own daughter.

If I say yes, will his feelings be hurt? In the end, when she was lonely, she killed me to get this over with, so her family would come. That's all she cared about - someone to comfort her.

But if I say no, maybe he'll say, she could have stopped the pain, and she didn't. The last betrayal: my own daughter did not stop the pain. If I say no, maybe he'll say, she loved me, but in the end, she was afraid. Will he understand? It must have been a hard decision. I won't hold it against her. I can absorb the pain she can't bear - what else are fathers for?

All our lives, when my sisters and I have had a problem we couldn't solve, we have taken it to my father. I remember one night when my sister was working late to finish up an insect collection for her science assignment. She had collected at least fifty insects and put them in glass jars with carbon tetrachloride. Then she shook them out and mounted them on long, black pins. One big Prometheus moth would not be killed. While she held it by the abdomen, it fluttered and flinched. She poked and missed, poked again. Sobbing, she tried to stick it through without tearing the brown eyes on its soft wings. I ran to get my father. He saw the situation at once, put the moth back into the jar, gave it a walloping dose of carbon tet, hugged my sister, pulled out the moth, and stuck it to the board. It quivered in place, the eyes on its wings wide in astonishment.

I've got to think harder and better now than I've ever thought in my life. Mercy-killing is an enormous act. When I try to weigh the consequences, the huge fact of it knocks over the careful balance of advantage and disadvantage, scattering every other consideration across the floor. It's a Promethean act, dangerous and proud - for better or for worse, stealing fire from the gods. It is beyond ethical categories. It is beyond laws and two signatures and review panels. Nothing requires it. Nothing justifies it. Greater than justice, it is an act of mercy, of stupendous, titanic love. It's a wrong that cannot be forgiven, a sharp-eyed, hard-beaked eagle tearing at Prometheus' immortal liver.

The silence in the kitchen is starting to congeal, taking on substance that seems to glisten. Through the window I can see a neighbor walking by, wondering if this is a good time to stop and deciding not. There are robins on the lawn, up to their hips in thick grass that needs to be mowed. I imagine there are neighbors who are not coming over to mow the grass because they don't want to disturb my father. But if he can hear, he will love the sound of the lawn mower moving back and forth, louder and quieter, coming and going. In the end, the sound of the lawn mower is the only thing I know for sure.

"No," I said. "Not today."

Kathleen Dean Moore is chair of the philosophy department at Oregon State University, Corvallis.