The meaning of Dr. K.

Very few people knew this, but a wealthy woman from California fell in love with Jack Kevorkian soon after he finally got himself convicted and sent to prison back in 1999.

Her name was Fuensanta Plaza, and while her name sounded like a shopping mall in Los Angeles, she was actually a Venezuelan who had lived many years in Switzerland. She would show up monthly, sometimes staying in the Townsend Hotel, and would take a limousine to see Dr. Death.

She was in her early 50s, highly educated, multilingual, had an exotic Mitteleuropean accent, and, with her dark hair and very white skin, could easily have fit in on the set of The Addams Family. She felt they were destined to be. Sometimes she talked as if he would be released and they would marry. Other times, she had visions of them ending it all together.

Once, she even mentioned smuggling some poison into prison, slipping it between the bars and biting it together, which, besides being practically impossible, given that they search you at Jacktown, smacked uncomfortably of Adolf and Eva's bunker farewell.

"Do you know what first brought us together?" she asked me once. "It was when we found out that we agreed that nobody who hated children and dogs could be all bad!" she said, laughing. I decided not to suggest a trip to Cedar Point.

For a while, the good Dr. Death looked forward to her visits; she was well-read, intelligent, and morbidly witty. She fooled herself (as other people have) into thinking that he cared for her. Kevorkian was bored in prison, and needed someone to amuse him. He was, however, incapable of forming any kind of deep, lasting human attachments.

Eventually, I think the senorita realized this. What really disillusioned her, however, was his failure to follow through on his promise to starve himself to death. Kevorkian had vowed for years to do that if he were ever imprisoned.

Once on the cellblock, however, that didn't look quite so appetizing. On one of the few occasions I talked to him during his prison years, he confessed a soft spot for "those chewy, rubbery cookies" they had in the prison cafeteria.

When Fuensanta realized Dr. Death wasn't ready to put his cyanide where his mouth was, she was scandalized. "He is killing Kevorkian so that Jack may liff!" she spluttered, accent thicker than usual. With that, she flounced back to California, where she became a devotee of the Norse gods.

I'm not making that up. Last year, she went to meet Loki. I don't know if she did self-medicide, though she told me once that she had vowed not to live to see 60, and she was three months short of that milestone when she entered Valhalla.

Last week, Jack Kevorkian joined her in what he believed would be eternal nothingness. Though he only talked to me once after he got out of the slam four years ago, (he said I was "too objective"), I once knew him as well as, or better than, any other journalist. I covered all his trials for The New York Times and did major pieces about him for Esquire and Vanity Fair.

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