I want to be like my great-grandmother, who was 102 when she died just before last Thanksgiving. I mean, this woman was old when I was born, and I was 27 when she died. Up until the last few years she was in very good health, especially for her age, and for the last, oh, two or three she was plugging along, though the last year she lost a lot of weight and became very very fragile. She nearly died just before her 100th when she broke her femur – she came this close to crashing in the emergency room, but nope. It healed fine. And though her hearing and sight were pretty much shot, up until about three days before she died (a UTI pushed her over the edge) she was mentally intact.
I hope I got those genes.
Whether I’d off myself…well, I don’t know, but if I did, I’d want to do it like the people with AIDS that Bangiadore mentioned. That would take the horrible surprise factor out of it as well. I know that if I contracted some ghastly incurable disease I would want to end my life when it started getting bad, or just before. That could happen tomorrow, or not for another sixty years. But I don’t think I would just because I was old.
I’m a coward. Unless it’s absolutely unbearable, I’d rather live with the hope that things will turn out better than kill myself. I just can’t imagine doing that to myself.
[mini-hijack]Since I mentioned cowardice and most (if not all, I skimmed a bit… sorry) of you would take the suicide route, what do you think of the common belief that suicide is the coward’s way out? I personally think the reverse but that’s just me.[/m-h]
If my theoretical kids want to see me sitting in a home, watching Wheel of Fortune for 10 years…rather, staring at the TV, drugged up, or whatever…well, tough titty. I don’t want to live with it and I don’t want to make THEIR kids be dragged to the Old Folks’ Home, where it smells bad and is generally creepy. So sure, I may piss my kids off, but I’ll be taking care of two generations (my generation and their kids). Won’t someone think of the CHILDREN?!
My desire to not live long enough to be a vegetable was cemented for me a while ago while Morelin and I were leaving the dentist’s office. Coming up the sidewalk was an old man. He was…Old and he’d earned the capital O. He was using a walker, right? So to move he had to move the walker 6 inches forward and put it down. THUMP! But he was so weak that he had to put all his weight on the walker, which made it RATTLE RATTLE RATTLE, then kinda scootch his feet forward 6 inches. And then repeat. I waited til we got to the car and said, “Oh, hell no. I never want to be that old. Shoot me first.”
I have thought about suicide before, as I’m sure mostly everyone has. I would only kill myself under the following conditions:
No one in my immediate family was alive.
I had enough money to cover burial expenses/debts.
I stopped believing in God.
I don’t plan to have kids. I don’t want to live in a home, but if it’s my only choice then I plan to tough it out. Maybe the other people at the home will be cool. Maybe we can liven the place up with tunes from our generation. Imagine old people waving their hands in the air like they just don’t care. Maybe we’d do the electric slide and play video games for recreation. Maybe by the time I’m old, they’ll have developed safe, non-addictive psychoactive drugs, and we can just lay in bed living in orgasmal bliss all day.
I wouldn’t want to kill myself out of fear of things getting worse. If I’m just frail and weak, but in otherwise painfree and of sound mind, I would try my best to hold on.
I would rather move to an country without a care system that already is a good way down its downward spiral. Learn how to survive in the wild, disappear for your last few years into nature. Screw eating jello from a straw in an old age home, I’d just as soon die from the eventual victory of nature or my own hand, though suicide is only if I’m mentally gone. I plan on arranging it so that I will be dead, either by my own hand or someone else’s, if I lose my mind.
Financial woes can be cured by an abandonment of society. Money, after all, is only an invention used to organize how our society works, not a necessity to life.
When soc. sec. was instituted, the average life span was less than the retirement age, i.e. the average soc. sec. beneficiary was already dead. If one wishes to point fingers, I am acquainted w/ Stephanie Mills and I could take a swing at her if one were so inclined—it was the generation’s choice to not have sufficient kids that created the current mess. (Rising benefits and lower relative retirement age round out the unholy trinity of the soc. sec. train wreck.) But WTF else would Baby Boomers have done? Sans soc. sec. they could have invested, then all retired at the same time, and got into a mad dash to liquidate their retirement holdings before their cohort tanked the market with a mass sell-off. Your parents weren’t “lucky,” they bred. It is the exact same problem as individuals having lots of kids to support them in old age, except that risk is spread around so that losers like me can benefit from others’ ability to reproduce.
I am skeptical that the picture of your future is what you perceive it to be, Eve. If you like what you do, if you make an effort to stay healthy, and if you start learning new skills and subject matters, you can probably bank on dropping dead before you end up in a nurning home. Joining an organization that helps you make friends with younger people wouldn’t hurt either.
We all know that we’re going to get old, and nothing prevents us from getting involved with the youth of today. If one is fifty and makes friends with thirty year olds, then when one is eighty, one will have a healthy network of spry sixty year olds as friends. Absent pathological dimentia, you could easily stay middle-aged until a catastrophic failure drops you fairly quickly.
Investment isn’t purely a financial operation. If you are concerned about this, then you have to decide how you’ll handle this watershed moment. Stick to your comfortable routine with a high probability of a premature suicide; or break from your routine and take up an exercise routine, learn new skills & subjects, and expand your social network? Personally, I’d like to see you discover something as intersting to you as film is, 'cos then maybe you’d write a book about something I find interesting. I’d enjoy reading that book.
Picunurse, I’m sorry for your loss. My brother-in-law took his own life, as did the children of a number of friends. Losing a child, especially by his or her own hand, is devastating. My condolences to you and your family.
But I think what we’re talking about here is very different. This isn’t about someone who is in the (seemingly) prime of their life. It’s about someone who has discussed this at length with those who are closest and who will not have the quality of life that makes life worth living. Yes, the person will be missed, but it should be a person’s right to choose when to end their life, particularly when that life is a neverending source of pain and suffering.
It has been my experience that watching someone endure failing health and constant dependency is far more painful than watching them die. If the suicide is carefully planned out (or in the case of Oregonians, scheduled), the horrid aftermath you mentioned will never happen. Sometimes, shielding your loved ones from watching a long, drawn-out, painful death is the kinder route to take.
Again, I’m not trying to minimize your pain or make you feel worse than you already do. I’m just saying that the circumstances are not always the same and it should be an option to those who don’t wish to live a life of pain, suffering, sickness, or dependency.
I suspect that many people will fail to make good on their intention to end it all at a certain point; old age (and disease, in many cases) doesn’t just suddenly descend upon you, it creeps up in imperceptibly small increments; I think I’d be right in saying that most people who, when they are young, make bold statements about offing themselves, actually find that later on, just one more sunrise would be nice and maybe tomorrow will be OK.
I think that may be true for the “creeping up” kind of old age, but some people develop cancer, lung ailments, broken bones, or other problems that come on suddenly. If I get the “Big C”, I’ll try treatment within reason, but if they can’t give me a few years of good life, I’ll be punching out shortly thereafter.
Plus, creeping up old age isn’t necessarily a shitty life. If you have a healthcare plan, you’re relatively active, and have people in your life (friends or family), you aren’t really in the shitty situation Eve described. I’ll know the bad life when I see it.
Yeah, like people told me when I was young, “Oh, you’ll change your mind and want children someday.” Never did change my mind, never did want children. And I would far rather be dead than go through what my mother is going through now, or what her parents did in their 80s and 90s.
Sauron and I both have a living will. No feeding tubes, no machines breathing for us, etc. let us go peacefully.
In fact, I’ll take it a step further…if I had a relative, spouse or close friend who was dying slowly and in pain with a terminal disease and asked me to help them commit suicide…I would do it in a heartbeat. And yes, I believe in God and think of myself as a spiritual person.
Still, I’ve worked around Alzheimer’s patients and the elderly and there is no way in hell I’m going out like that or have my family watch me disappear little by little every day.
We are living longer and that isn’t necessarily a good thing. Just because medicine can keep us around for a longer time does not mean it is a healthy or active time.
For most older people I know ( and I know loads of them) their entire week is filled up with doctors appointments, therapy appointments and church. church being the only one it is easy to get into, lasts only an hour and no RX cost.
And attending funerals of their friends and loved ones.
Living longer does not mean living better.
The Medical Community is morally and legally obligated to keep you alive and do everything for you, unless you state otherwise.
After seeing death first hand and how freaking slow it takes the body to die, I am all for a medically assisted suicide. In a controlled, consenting enviroment.
Rather than jumping out of a low flying airplane and going splat on some poor schmoe’s patio.
Being that Medicide will never be socially or morally approved in my life time or possibly the life time of my grand children, I will have to think about other options.
I have a card in my wallet that says “ALWAYS RESUSCITATE”. I’m uncomfortable with my own mortality - there’s almost nothing but constant physical torture that would inspire me to take my own life. I don’t care if that means wasting away in a nursing home, surviving fifty years brain dead, being a burden on my family, whatever.
I don’t plan to have children, and I don’t want to count on social security, so I’m going to start hoarding and investing as soon as I get out of college. I plan to go out frail, wrinkled, broken-hipped, senile, and above all pampered. If possible.
I am sorry for yours and your mother’s situation Eve, truly, and I may have overestimated the figures a little, however, I still maintain that a lot of youngsters say they will kill themselves rather than allow themselves to get old and a bit doddery but when they actually get there, decide that it’s better than nothing after all - young people make a lot of rash statements, that was the entiretly of my point.
I don’t know how, but I overlooked your first post in this thread, so I can understand your reaction to my post.
Well, my partner is 17 years younger than me, so assuming that we stay together forever, then when I’m 80, he’ll be a spry 63 and still able to look after me. I work out and eat right, so I’ll probably never need a walker or have a fractured hip in my old age. However, should circumstances happen that my quality of life would be diminished, damn straight I’m taking the Big Plunge. I’ve already been through the loss of consciousness during surgery, so I know that death is nothing to fear and is far more prferable to a weak, diminished life as an invalid in a nursing home.
I like the idea of going out like Petrnious did in Nero’s reign: invite friends over, have a party and open my veins and bleed to death, making jokes and cracking wise until I keel over.
Devil’s Advocate: If you were far gone enough into senility that you didn’t know where or who you were, how would you have enough cognitive powers to know you wanted to end your life? Or how would you communicate this desire to others and not be taken as just insane ramblings?
Conversely, if your mind was sharp but your body decaying, how would you know when it was the right time to go and not too late or too early? I guess, to put it more succinctly, where is that “point of no return” in either situation?
Discussions like this always remind me of the book/movie Logan’s Run, about a dystopian society populated exclusively by young people left over after a mandatory age-based death sentence. The movie is a pretty hokey and the book just plain weird, but I’ve always thought that the larger philosophical issues the story raised were appropriate in our day & age.
Well, senility doesn’t come on overnight (unless you suffer a stroke or a head injury), so you can see it coming and get while the gettin’s good. If you have a stroke and your mind is pretty well fried (as was my Father-in-law’s) the prospect of a slow, mindless death isn’t such a bad thing – for the person who’s dying. However, I wouldn’t want my family to have to watch me deteriorate. I hope my husband or son will have the strength to figure out a way to let me go without getting caught.
I know a lot of people live long, productive lives with crippled bodies, but I’m not one of them. If I was bound to a wheelchair, I’d have to figure out a way to drive it off a bridge.
My pets’ veterinarian and I discussed assisted suicide and the like when I was having one of my ferrets put to sleep. My pet was suffering greatly, dealing with a heart condition plus other issues that had arisen, and just looking at her made my heart break over what she was going through. The vet remarked that she wished something similar could be done for people who wanted to die with some level of dignity. She talked about a favorite uncle of hers who had been a brilliant and witty man. He died slowly, strapped down to a bed because he had been, even in his weakened condition, trying to remove the equipment that was attached to him so that he might pass on more quickly, and the hospital had to prevent him from doing so. She said she had trouble bearing to see the pain and desperation in his eyes when she came to visit him in such a state.
I don’t want to wither away, attached to tubes and machines that keep my body going long past any proper semblance of a life has ended.