BACK OFF! I'M NOT DEAD YET.

As far as I can tell, bioethicists exist for the most part to do some moral chin-pulling before giving the green light to whatever consensus the rest of the elite have reached. If you believe, as the Dutch do, that it's fine for a children's hospital to euthanize severely disabled infants, you can always find a bioethicist to give you a stamp of approval. If you want to harvest the organs of dying people without waiting for brain death to occur, you can probably find a bioethicist to sign on to that, too. Myself, I'm with Slate blogger Mickey Kaus. In 2003, as the Schiavo controversy was raging and Yale surgeon Sherwin Nuland, author of "How We Die" and an advocate of limited assisted suicide, was pontificating on National Public Radio about her low quality of life, Kaus wrote: "If I'm ever in Terri Schiavo's situation, and not in any pain, please follow these simple steps: Keep the feeding tube in, and keep Dr. Nuland out."

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It's not surprising that many people have reservations about theories of "dying well" that always seem to involve not staying alive. In 2004, the Hastings Center Report, a journal that focuses on bioethics, reported that despite decades of aggressive promotion of living wills, only 18 percent of Americans of all races had them, including only 35 percent of residents of nursing homes. Those most suspicious of the talk about "dying well" are African Americans and members of other minority groups. African Americans are only one-third as likely as whites to have a living will, and only one-fifth as many blacks as whites sign DNR orders.

According to the article's authors, it seems that people talk a good game about living wills, especially when they're healthy, but when their health begins to fail, they often have very different ideas about what they would be willing to undergo to stave off death for a little while. Furthermore, according to a 1990s study by the National Institutes of Health, even when patients have living wills, if those wills contain directives with which doctors and hospitals disagree (such as, I myself suspect, prolonging the patient's life instead of terminating it), many doctors simply ignore the patient's desires. Living wills, it would seem, are effective only if they happen to comport with doctors' and bioethicists' own theories about what is best for the patient anyway. For this reason, the authors of the Hastings study propose that instead of filling out a living will, people execute a durable power of attorney, a simple document that entrusts decisions about end-of-life care to a relative or friend who shares the signer's moral beliefs about death and dying. That sounds about right to me.

A year ago, I received the gentlest of shoulder-taps from the man with the bony fingers, though he'll inevitably be back. I wish we lived in a different kind of society, one with agreed ideas about what a "good death" means -- but we don't, at least not now. So I say: Go ahead and sign a living will if you want. Have your doctor pull out your feeding tube or inject you with cyanide or do whatever fulfills your idea of death with dignity. But count me out. I don't want to "die well"; I just want to die in peace.

charfleur@aol.com

Charlotte F. Allen is the author of "The Human Christ:

The Search for the Historical Jesus."