The Limits of Care:

In 1985, Roswell Gilbert was convicted of murder in the shooting death of his wife Emily who suffered from Alz- heimers disease and osteoporosis. Although Emily had asked to die in the presence of witnesses, the Florida jury was pressed to- ward its harsh treatment of Roswell by his choice of weapon, staunch refusal to repudiate his decision, and Emilys relatively high functional level at the time of her death. Nearly a decade lat- er, issues of the limits of family responsibility in caregiving re- main prominent in the literatures of gerontology and applied eth- ics. This paper revisits the Gilbert case with insights from Joseph A. Varon, Chief Counsel at the trial of Roswell Gilbert and Martha Gilbert Moran, Roswell and Emilys only daughter. The paper in- tegrates applied ethical and sociological theories about the family into a discussion of family decision making around caregiving and its termination. Specifically, the paper uses symbolic interaction theory with Nod- dings theory of caring and exchange theory with Blusteins discus-sion of duty and autonomy to address two questions: (1) Who owns the decision about the termination of care? and (2) What are the grounds for state intervention into family decision making on behalf of an individual who has expressed, verbally or through a written will, a desire to die? It is suggested that social scientists need to re- fine research methods in order to document the development of fam- ily belief systems that support life-and-death decision making. Fur- ther research is indicated on spousal and intergenerational relation- ships as the social context for decisions families make about care and its termination. The approach of the paper is to integrate family so- ciological theory with perspectives from legal and applied ethical analyses.