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Originally Posted by Katsunami
I hope I'm dead before stuff like that happens to me. I hope my parents are dead before it happens to them.
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I think of the late Sir Terry Pratchett, who campaigned for legally assisted suicide. He had been diagnosed with Early Onset Alzheimer's, and his condition was steadily worsening. He could still speak, at the time, but could no longer use a keyboard, so he wrote with assistance of a text to speech program that let him dictate his manuscripts. He had also lost the ability to distinguish between male and female signs on bathrooms, and traveled with a minder to assist.
I worked on the last North American Diskworld convention before he died, and the con put out the word about two weeks before that Sir Terry would not be attending. The reason given was that he was in final edits for the next book. A friend who is a published author said that was nonsense - he had done final edits on books while appearing as a guest at cons. I thought it likely that Sir Terry's condition had declined enough to make trans-Atlantic travel inadvisable, even with a companion, but no one wanted to come out and say that.
I know Sir Terry was looking at checking out on his own terms when things got too bad, and his public support for assisted suicide was likely a matter of protecting those who might assist him in doing so. He died of natural causes before pulling that trigger, so we can't know when he might have said "That's it. I'm leaving.", but he wanted the option.
I also think of a Japanese chap named J. Koizumi, Whose autobiography "My Life in Judo" I read decades back. As the title indicates, he was a Judoka, and had attained a 7th degree black belt. (There are only two higher ranks in the discipline.) He was a founder of the sport in Britain, and coached the British Olympic team. When his health deteriorated to an unacceptable level, he shaved, bathed, dressed in his best suit, and put his head into the oven and turned on the gas. He didn't want to become a burden on others, and had lived a full life and had proven accomplishments in this chosen field. He left a note stating his friends would understand.
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While people are getting older and older, I firmly believe many people nowadays are becoming older than what is reasonable for a human being. Yes, some people can become 100 without a hitch, but most can't. Life expectancy is increasing year after year, but are those extra years worth it? For some, they are; for many, they aren't.
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It boils down to what is called "quality of life". And it's problematic because the current trend is to preserve life no matter what. I have problems with that. We don't get to choose when we are born, but should be able to decide when we go. At what point is life no longer worth living?
I think my mother would have taken assisted suicide had the option been available to her.
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Dennis