On a brisk day at a restaurant outside Chicago, Deb Robertson sat with her teenage grandson to talk about her death.
She’ll probably miss his high school graduation. She declined the extended warranty on her car. Sometimes she wonders who will be at her funeral.
Those things don’t frighten her much. The 65-year-old didn’t cry when she learned two months ago that the cancerous tumors in her liver were spreading, portending a tormented death.
But later, she received a call. A bill moving through the Illinois Legislature to allow certain terminally ill patients to end their own lives with a doctor’s help had made progress.
Then she cried.
“Medical-aid in dying is not me choosing to die,” she says she told her 17-year-old grandson. “I am going to die. But it is my way of having a little bit more control over what it looks like in the end.”
That same conversation is happening beside hospital beds and around dinner tables across the country, as Americans who are nearing life’s end negotiate the terms with themselves, their families and, now, state lawmakers.
The flip side of our ability to prolong life more and more successfully is that we equip ourselves to extend suffering more and more unbearably.
Puritanical attitudes around the right to die will impact a vast majority of people in terrible ways that will largely get ignored as on the other end of it the victims have no voice and often the family is mourning and wants to move on or just doesn’t even fully realize how terrible that end was.
But the doctors and medical staff…
The people I know well in those roles get upset when healthy patients take a turn for the worse and die when they had so much life before that. But by far the most upset I see them is when a family member of a patient decides because of beliefs to choose life prolonging options that are the equivalent of extended torture.
As our medical capabilities improve we really need to continually rethink just what it means to “do no harm.”
My grandpa passed a year ago now, COPD. Likely honestly a heart attack after all the steroid meds for his lungs created heart problems including a heart aneurysm. When he was diagnosed way back in 2006 they told us he had 5 years if he was lucky, I didn’t think he’d see me graduate HS. Well he had a lot more than 5 years in him but after about 2014 it was all shit. He started telling my grandma that he was ready to die, wanted to die, in 2018, he begged for it on hard nights. He tried to kill himself in 2021 and 2022. Both attempts left him strapped to a hospital bed “for his safety” as he struggled to breathe, he hadn’t been able to reliably breathe laying on his back for several years by then but they didn’t care as long as he lived.
I never felt anything but sympathy for him after those attempts. As someone with chronic lifelong asthma, I know how my end will go. I know what it’s like to suffocate and struggle to breathe and in case anyone wonders, it fucking sucks. It’s terrifying, it’s slow, and you know it’s coming. Panic is inevitable. He felt like that for nearly 10 fucking years. He told me once after it had gotten bad that he’d always felt so bad for me as a kid to have asthma but now he finally understood, he said I was so brave to have dealt with it for so long but in that moment I didn’t feel brave I felt lucky. When I use my inhaler I can breathe again, for him it just made him struggle less. For a long time I wished he would die, my absolute favorite person on the planet, and I wanted them dead. It destroyed me mentally for years. When he finally did die it was horribly sad and also such a massive relief for everyone to know that at least he wasn’t suffering anymore.
I say all this, partially to get it off my chest but mostly to say, if we are going to prolong life we need to also give people the option to check out. Life isn’t life without quality of health, it’s just suffering. Prolonging suffering makes use torturers, it’s not a saving grace. If we have the capacity to do this for our pets then people deserve the same mercy.
It must be tough to get to the end of your life and see nothing but people looking to profit off your passing.
Put me in a coffee can and blow it up or something.
I always said: “just put me out with the trash”.
The cost of anything death related is so immensly high, even the cheap options are too much imo.
Budget Cremation: they toss the body in a dumpster and set it on fire.
My mom said the same thing most of her life. When it came down to it, (bone cancer in her hip) she asked to be cremated, and her ashes scattered somewhere she’d never been. That’s hard to do, she’s been a lot of places.
Personally given how fucked my brain is from mental unwellness, I’d like my remains to be studied for whatever I can provide to the future of modern medicine.
The dying and dead are great people to fight for, you get to name ANYTHING your heart desires and claim you’re doing it for them.
The dying can contradict you and you can just blame it on delirium “See! They’re so crazy from illness that they think they don’t need me, that PROVES that they need me!”, and the dead will quietly let you exploit them for sympathy!
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“Off yourself by X date and your designated beneficiary will receive a payout equal to 5% of the expected healthcare costs of managing your condition until your inevitable agonizing death! Act now and we’ll throw in an additional funeral package at no cost!”
I don’t know about the funeral package. Those things are expensive and you’re talking about insurance companies.
Hey I didn’t say it was even a decent package!
“Thanks for calling Joe’s Crematorium, you kill 'em, we torch 'em, what can I do for you?”
This is the largest reason why it has to remain illegal. Capitalism will find a way to make it marketable.
It should also be noted that these decisions primarily affect people who are too poor to afford to travel with their loved ones to places that currently allow assisted suicide. If you’re wealthy you are able to die how you want.
Mostly true, but there comes a point in poor health where you cannot travel at all, or fulfill the requirement of physically starting or engaging in the death process (if required), even if you’re rich as Croesus. This especially applies to end-term cancer, motor neuron diseases, etc. If you can’t drink through a straw, you can’t use your hands, or you can’t speak or otherwise make your wishes known, that excludes you from a number of programs that exist now.
In addition, there’s a catch-22 of how, when you are dying of a progressive disease like ALS or Huntington’s, every minute is bringing you closer to exactly the kind of suffering you want to avoid, while you may not yet be sick enough to physically qualify under the terms of that specific program or its country’s laws.
For example, if you were to want go to Dignitas in Switzerland, you are looking at a roughly 6 month lead time to get all the approvals and interviews and paperwork done, during which your disease may well progress to the point that even if you had a private plane and an army of carers to get you there, you would not be able to get there, or if you did, not be able to fulfill the requirements of the program. (They may have since removed this requirement as I no longer see it mentioned in Wikipedia, but back in the day if you could not pick up the cup or drink through the straw yourself, that was a complete disqualifier for Dignitas, understandably so.)
And even then, there are countries like the UK, and the number of people who could not travel and were forced to go through endless litigation with the government trying to get the right to end their suffering legally – but in doing so made it impossible to do on the sly without subjecting their survivors to legal jeopardy and possible accusations of murder. (Which is rather ironic, given that King George V was euthanized by his doctor with the royal family’s permission.)
I think a lot of that is changing, but not quickly enough. It’s still the age-old ongoing strife between people who can’t face their own inner baggage about the deaths of others, and people who just don’t see the point of needless terminal suffering.
For example, there are still methods anyone can use for autothanasia, rich or poor, like VSED, and today Nembutal is still fairly easy to get south of the US border – but even then if you have a personal carer that insists you do not have the right to end your physical suffering, and they squirt water down you throat or throw out your just-in-case meds, you’re screwed anyway.
I’d support it for any nation with free healthcare. But people are now going to be choosing between being with their families and not bankrupting them. I would not doubt it would be used to justify insurance companies not covering terminally ill patients because they only cover death for the terminaly ill.
Yeah, as great of an idea it is, it’s terrifying to envision this through the lense of American capitalists.
I shouldn’t need a reason.
This is not so much about giving you a reason than giving a doctor the legal option to assist you.
I understand. And, that doctor shouldn’t be able to deny my request.
I think Kovorkian has the right idea, honestly.
I’m permanently disabled with a degenerative condition. Once I’m just surviving and not living, I’d love the freedom of a painless end. I watched grandparents suffer, I’ve watched them be kept alive through machines and drugs, I listened to my grandfather beg me for death… you’ll never change my mind that assisted suicide for the terminally ill is the ethical choice.
Eh, I used to be all in favor of Right To Death laws, but when Canada passed theirs they started pushing the disabled and impoverished onto it, not just the terminally ill. Which is basically ethnic cleansing.
So while I understand the Slippery Slope argument is not a good one, I’m going to need to see some common sense restrictions before I could support this as fervently as I did before
Looking at likes to dislikes ratio I am in relative minority, but I think all efforts should be spent on increasing lifespan instead of shortening it.
And this is before considering psycological impact killing patients makes on doctors.
Why do you feel people should have their suffering prolonged?
“Everyone who got papercut should be killed because sepsis is suffering” - someone pro-euthanasia. Maybe few centuries ago.
Who the heck is saying that people should be killed? It’s about providing the option, not forcing it.
