Dying Shouldn’t Be So Brutal
By IRA BYOCK
JANUARY 31, 2015 2:30 PM
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/01/31/dying-shouldnt-be-so-brutal/?comments#permid=13996527
Dying can be easy, or it can be very hard.
My father lived a full life. At 84 he got up one morning, had breakfast. An hour later, he died of heart failure. That, to me, would be an ideal way to die.
My mother, now 94, is still living independently. She hopes to pass in a way similar to my father, but there are no guarantees.
On the other hand, my mother-in-law died this past Monday after years of moving to increasingly intensive dementia care facilities, with a few short stays in lock-down psychiatric wards in between. Finally she ended up in a very nice care facility, where she was well taken care of on Medicare only (we were lucky). By this time, though, her quality of life was reduced to nothing, confined to a wheel chair, unaware of where she was and who was around her, and more or less in constant pain.
I would wish that voluntary end-of-life planning be extended to all States, and that the conditions for voluntary end-of-life would be extended to include other than incurable diseases with only a few months to live. I realize that there are a lot of difficult ethical, medical, legal and social issues involved with no easy all-purpose answers. But if we look at the other end of the spectrum, the seemingly endless variations of non-traditional conception and birth, with equally difficult ethical, medical, legal and social issues involved, which have not all been addressed, much less solved, it seems to me we could allow a little more freedom at the other end also.
My father lived a full life. At 84 he got up one morning, had breakfast. An hour later, he died of heart failure. That, to me, would be an ideal way to die.
My mother, now 94, is still living independently. She hopes to pass in a way similar to my father, but there are no guarantees.
On the other hand, my mother-in-law died this past Monday after years of moving to increasingly intensive dementia care facilities, with a few short stays in lock-down psychiatric wards in between. Finally she ended up in a very nice care facility, where she was well taken care of on Medicare only (we were lucky). By this time, though, her quality of life was reduced to nothing, confined to a wheel chair, unaware of where she was and who was around her, and more or less in constant pain.
I would wish that voluntary end-of-life planning be extended to all States, and that the conditions for voluntary end-of-life would be extended to include other than incurable diseases with only a few months to live. I realize that there are a lot of difficult ethical, medical, legal and social issues involved with no easy all-purpose answers. But if we look at the other end of the spectrum, the seemingly endless variations of non-traditional conception and birth, with equally difficult ethical, medical, legal and social issues involved, which have not all been addressed, much less solved, it seems to me we could allow a little more freedom at the other end also.
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