In 2019, three community women asked to meet with me about a compelling community education concern. The spouses of these women had all struggled to use the VSED end-of-life option because our county’s only hospital, and associated hospice program, had religious affiliations and, therefore, was unable to support VSED.
After he died, Jean and her sister both looked at one other and said, “That’s how I’m going to die.”
“Death would not be called bad, O people, if one knew how to truly die.”
— Nanak
“We reached the goal for patients like me, who aren’t terminal but degenerative, to win this battle, a battle that opens the doors for the other patients who come after me.”
Given the fact of our mortality, whether we want it or not, aren’t we all members of a Date with Death Club?
“We’re literally legislating what states of life are worth protecting, which is very, very similar to the abortion debate.”
What is death? In a post Roe world, right to life groups may have some new thoughts on this.
It should be clear, as we argued in the first part of this two-part post, that the word “suicide” is not always appropriate. In this second part of our post, we offer a candidate word.
The distress and pain that surrounds the suicide of a healthy person is different in kind and in degree from the distress and pain of the hastened death of a dying person. Vocabularies need to account for the difference between a killing and a death.
