Just piss off Richard Widmark. That usually does the trick.
Ooooooh…I saw him in a crappy detective movie last week, and scene was all I could think of!
Too bad this guy didn’t have another option and had to go the “icky” route:
http://www.cnn.com/2004/US/West/03/30/fatal.jump.ap/index.html
This really illustrates the need for a nation-wide assisted suicide program. Or a nation-wide patio canopy program. (Sorry…that was dark, wasn’t it?)
Here’s something else to consider: my health. Or rather, my quality of life.
I have allergies. I get outbreaks of atopic dermatitis/eczema for No Apparent Reason. Right now I’m on antihistimines and tonight I’ll have to put on some steroid-infused goo to keep my skin from its latest allergy-related hissyfit. I get migraines. My right knee is messed up from when I was a kid and sometimes swells or gimps up. At least once a week, my stomach takes a disliking to something and I’m feeling nauseaous or riding on the porcelain schoolbus. And I’m 23! In the prime of health! 1. What kinda problems am I gonna have when I’m 70? and 2. I’m annoyed by it all now. I can’t imagine putting up with it 40-50 more years.
I am never up early enough to see the sunrise.
Logically, if you are degenerating due to old age, tomorrow will only make you older, and more frail. Tomorrow will not be ok, it will make your eyesight poorer, your mind slower and your bones more brittle and achy.
. . . and your pocketbook more empty and Social Security more bankrupt, and your level of care bumped down to being tied to your wheelchair and fed gruel by surly underpaid aides . . .
Yup. I’ve got to get my suicide fund in order. There’s no way I’m going to end up like my husband’s grandmother…sitting in the hallway of a urine-soaked nursing home, her nightgown pulled up over her head, pleading in German for someone to give her back just a shred of her dignity. No fucking way…no fucking way…no fucking way.
Interesting question …
When I was younger, I was solidly in the express-check-out camp. I even had a suicide kit made up, with morphine and potassium cyanide.
(I was nearly frightened to death when I first went to grad school. It seems the city conducted an air raid siren test on the first day of the month. This was during the worst part of Reagan’s administration, when he was daring the Soviets to attack.)
With age, however, I have come to a decision: life is precious. Even when life sucks – I am getting divorced as I write this – life is still precious. How did Woody Allen put it? “I plan on achieving immortality through not dying.”
Let me put the question to you in another way: Suppose the person closest to you in this world was dying a horrible death, and it was possible for you to legally end that person’s suffering. Would you help them end their life?
note to self go into the funeral business.
Ah, logic.
I think you might actually be oversimplifying the issue; many of the older people I know seem to have good days and not so good days - the good days might get fewer, further between and not quite so good on a sort of averaged basis over time, but I don’t believe it is true to say that old age is a smooth and unrelenting decline into unpleasantness for everyone or even for most people.
Or maybe things are just different where I live, I don’t know.
I agree. But Eve is saying that she doesn’t want to stick around when the bad stuff happens. She knows what her financial situation is; she doesn’t know for sure about the health thing, but it’s pretty much inevitable that illness will drastically change our lives as we age. Hell, if I was rich and healthy, I wouldn’t care how old I was as long as I was still being invited to faaaabulous parties and doing something meaningful with my life. Unfortunately, my reality probably won’t play out that way.
That’s fair enough, I wouldn’t ever wish to interfere or criticise the decisions of individuals, it’s just my impression that a lot of younger people often say things like “Sheesh! who wants to end up like that? I’d rather kill myself”, talking about older people who actually have quite a good quality of life - making such a proclamation without actually having any real grasp on the issue they are addressing.
I don’t include Eve in this group.
Gosh, darn you sound just like me almost 20 years ago!
Really!
I’ve got allergies up the wazoo (seasonal, nasal, asthma, skin/eczema) and went through episodes of “What **** did I eat this time to mess me up?” and all that. And yeah, I’ve got a bum right knee, too! Imagine that!
Know something? These last 10 years the allergies have finally started to abate. Except for the food allergies. At this rate, by 80 I’ll have clear sinuses and perfect (if wrinkled) skin! 'Course, I won’t be able to eat anything because they’ll be putting allergens into all the foods, but hey, details…
Seriously, my health has IMPROVED starting and 30 and marching onward. So ya never know. It’s not perfect, but it’s a lot better.
My strategy is to stay as healthy as possible as long as possible and hope I die in my sleep.
And should I ever feel compelled to jump out of an airplane, with or without parachute, I will have the courtesy to do so away from other peoples’ property. That dude was just plain rude.
I can’t see how we live in societies that refuse to see animals suffer yet refuse to euthanise those people who are suffering long past the point of wanting t be alive.
I love animals. I don’t want them to suffer but most animals are not pets and their lives end in a less then ideal way. We are often kinder to our pets.
Grandparents or parents are a different thing. It seems inhumane to care more for a pet then it does for our elders. I watched my grandma be more alive then dead for months. When she could speak she made it clear she would rather be dead. When she couldn’t speak all of her family would have rather seen her dead.
We live in a “civilised” society though, so we were not allowed to offer her a kind way out. She had to stay there to the last breath. The last agonised breath (it was lung related). It was horrible for her and all of us.
A civilised society (IMHO) needs to recognise the need for assisted death.
I say that as a “survivor” of suicide…those bastards should be hung for trying. AH Irony is a wonderful thing.
Wow, what a dark, interesting thread. Reading it is like watching a Quentin Tarantino flick - at some parts you wanna cringe and look away but you just can’t.
I gotta tell you, after a brief stint in a psychological ward a few years back for clinical depression, I’m ready to choose life over death any day. True, depression is a whole lot different from the much of the ugliness that accompanies old age (blindness, deafness, mental deterioration, etc.), but the sheer absurdity of life is too fun to give up. It took me until recently to realize it (I’m a young’un at 20), but I’m going to consider myself blessed with every day neural impulses continue to flow through my brain. Even if that means frequent escape attempts from the old-folks home which get me half-way down the hall before I’m caught. In a semi-transparent teddy. Wearing bunny slippers. Oh, the nursing aides are gonna love me!
That said, I think anyone with a terminal illness that prevents them from living a quality life should have the right to end it peacefully, at the time of their choosing. And if they choose to live on, more power to 'em. They should never be made to feel as though they are a “burden” to loved ones. This whole “being a burden” issue makes me feel really uncomfortable. I hope my parents never view themselves as a burden to me or my brothers, and I hope to have the kind of friends and family who won’t view me as a burden either.
I have a critical illness insurance policy. 1 in 4 of us will die from a critical illness says the insurance co that sold me this policy. Given that I have the poilcy, I won’t be the one, but I am prepared.
I watched my brother waste from cancer. I heard him say that if he knew what chemo was really like, he would have chosen death.
My plan is to cash in my CI policy, take a trip, a nice one, sail through the Galapagos, or around the Seychelles, maybe or both, what the hell, with a good friend or two. When I come back, start the morphine for pain and that’ll be it.
If it turns out not to be C, but rather old age, which the policy doesn’t pay out for, I’ll make a determintation and talk to a friend or two and be on my way.
My sister (who I live with) and I have had this discussion and we know each other’s wishes. We are both DNR’s as are my parents.
“Interesting,” he said as he sat, bleary-eyed from another night trying to sleep with itchy skin and steroid goo all over.
I’ll probably go on, bitching the whole way. I’m quite the big man on message boards. 