Painting by Belynda Wilson Thomas

A good death does honour to a whole life. Petrarch

All my life, one of my parent’s favorite sayings was, “We have to endure to the end.” Does this mean different things to different people? With modern medicine, do we live longer but not always better in the final days? People are being offered the chance to die with dignity, but if they take the offer, does this mean they did not endure to the end?

How do we feel if someone is offered the chance to die with dignity, and takes the offer, but we don’t think it should have been offered, or taken up on? We have life-extending medical intervention, and now we have MAID (Medical Assistance in Dying).

Going through Hospice care at home with Mom and being there for her last breath, we all appreciated her death was not a long, drawn-out affair; she probably most of all. Did the medication she was given for pain hasten that final breath? I think it probably did, and I was the one who administered the final dose.

Offering someone a good death isn’t something I will rail against, but are we offering it to people who could still have a good life? This is where it gets tricky. If the end is truly nigh, and only suffering lies ahead, is shortening that suffering a bad thing?

As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so a life well-used life brings happy death. Leonardo da Vinci

Making the decision of the day and the hour we will take our last breath seems like a hard decision, but would it be if all we saw ahead for ourselves was endless hours, days, weeks, and maybe even months of nothing but never-ending pain?

Once we get on the medical conveyor belt, we might be extending life, but is it a quality of life we want? What might have ended in a peaceful, earlier death becomes an extended life of excruciating pain. Now, to end the pain, we need medical intervention because we interfered in what would have been a quicker, natural death.

I don’t know what the answers are, and I know there is a lot of criticism of MAID. We used to have Hemlock Societies, which was a right-to-die organization. Now we have the right to die, but choosing to die is a controversial subject. Who gets to have input on the choice being made?

I think, if things were to get bad enough for me, I would want the choice, but Mom and Dad’s words of endurance to the end would also be ringing in my ears. If someone I loved was making the choice, would I be able to support their choice wholeheartedly?

How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard. A.A. Milne

To live in hearts we leave behind is not to die. Thomas Campbell

Death is very likely the single best invention of life. It is life’s change agent. Steve Jobs

Thank you for reading this post. Please come back and read more, and have a blessed day filled with gratitude, joy, and love.

To subscribe, comment, see archives, or categories of posts, click on the picture and scroll to the end.

Thank you for reading my books, and a special thank you to those who leave a review on Goodreads and Amazon. If you click on the Amazon link and purchase an item, I receive a small percentage of the sale through the Amazon affiliate program.