The Scribbler's Take on Assisted Suicide

My Aunt did a fantastic job explaining her views on assisted suicide. Mine is going to be much shorter and less poetic, because I am not completely certain of what I believe, however I can share some of my recent thoughts.

This is a really brutal subject to try and approach. There are so many factors and so many variables that makes every single situation different. What I can say is this.

I believe that life is precious. However I also believe that the quality of life one endures has a bearing on decisions such as these. If I were at the end of my days, living in pain and discomfort, or have completely lost my faculties, then I would want it ended. In fact, my wishes regarding this have already been made known to those who will make the decision if I happened to lose the ability to do so myself. Being, for all intents and purposes, a vegetable, being kept alive on machines is not how I wish to spend my days. The pain and misery people go through in terminal diseases is brutal, and as one commenter on the previous post said, we put down dogs because it is more 'humane' than to let them suffer.

I bring forward the idea of passive euthanasia. Why do we put people on machines, and medications to hold them here, just a little while longer, when those people we knew and loved are pretty much gone? Why are we fighting a never ending uphill battle, when death will come regardless. I think we hold onto them because we can't imagine a world without them, and even a small piece of them still here is better than none. That's not really fair to the suffering, nor, if we are going to be honest about it, ourselves.

I keep going back to thinking about my mom. Wondering, if she had had a choice, whether she would have chosen to go by way of some drawn out disease so that we could have worked through our grief slower. At first I thought that if she were doing it for us, and not herself, than yes. She would have chosen to go after a time, so that we could have said goodbye and had some more time together knowing it was ending. However then I thought about how my memories would have changed to ones containing a broken woman, frail and wasting away instead of the vibrant, bright woman I remember now. I think how it happened, would be exactly how my mother would have chosen to go, although about 50 years later.

I'm not saying it's right or wrong. It truly is a very slippery slope. Allowing this to become a legal practice means that soon we will be discussing what age, what illnesses, how advanced do the illnesses need to be to allow such a seemingly monstrous action to occur. That all seems too horrific to discuss.  I'm also not advocating suicide. I do believe if there are options, they need to be attempted. Preserving life is always preferable than ending it.

Maybe this is just one more reminder that we need to live every day to the fullest. That we need to express our love for people. That we need to live this day as if it could be our last.