A Mother’s Decision to Die - The New Old Age Blog - NYTimes.com

by Paula Span

I was talking to a woman in Rhode Island the other day whose father is in a nursing home with advanced dementia. Her weary mother had voiced a fairly common sentiment: “When I reach that point, just leave a bottle of pills by the bed.”

Readers of this blog often express the same just-shoot-me idea whenever we discuss topics like increasing frailty, cruel progressive diseases and nursing homes. Sometimes the comments reflect jocular bravado: “My choice, of course, will be to OD on delicious biskits ‘n’ gravy,” Doyle wrote here a few weeks ago.

Sometimes, though, people sound quite serious. “Nature tells us when it is time to go,” Frank in Houston commented. “Sometimes it is up to us to listen to nature and take action.” I found myself wondering if Frank had already made arrangements, or at least started his research.

Expressing such opinions has been much easier and more common than acting on them. The religious and political opposition remains strong. A recent Montana Supreme Court decision brings the number of states where physician-assisted suicide is legal — the advocates at Compassion & Choices prefer to call it “aid in dying” — to just three. (Oregon and Washington are the others.) But even where it’s legal, when competent people suffering from terminal illnesses decide they want to end their lives, such decisions aren’t simple, and shouldn’t be. And their effects are rarely limited to the dying themselves.
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