I have seen a couple of people who went from being completely healthy to nearing death's door without any early warning signs. While not very young were still too young to die - their parents were still alive. How a person thinks about their own impending death is probably more complex than anything else they might have spend their time thinking about. Having an estimated date attached to an event that is an absolutely certainty in everyone's life, it becomes hyper-real to that person and those close to them. It can be an out of body experience for loved ones who cannot forget for a minute what is coming and yet the person's life and normalcy feels like a daily miracle they are grateful to witness. I could not help thinking about my journey as a helpless bystander to the soon to come death of people I loved, as I read this story abut medically assisted death.
..legalized MAID, allowing physicians to administer lethal drugs to patients who, as the law put it, had a “grievous and irremediable” sickness, disease, and disability and whose “natural death” was “reasonably foreseeable.” (Interpretations of the term “reasonably foreseeable” and what sort of timeline it denotes can vary, but it is generally understood by clinicians that it can mean several years.) This would, presumably, allow individuals with terminal illnesses to end their lives when they wanted and on their own terms.
Of all the key-phrases listed here, the more pernicious one is "reasonably foreseeable". What does that even mean. There are people in this world who bring incomparable value to the lives of others every hour and minute they live. The "foreseeable" is hardly a number a clinician can assign to their life. Then the issue of "grievous and irremediable" while that sounds like an absolute truth, it could be that the patient's perspective should matter too.
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