LaTigresse
Posts: 26123
Joined: 1/15/2006
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quote:
ORIGINAL: lazarus1983
Topics like these are always very weird to me. Because the people debating it are 90% of the time just presuming, looking at the situation from a distance. What we're debating isn't happening to us, and so it ends up being, "I think those people should/shouldn't because of how I feel." Seems a bit backwards to me.
Now if that were happening to me, I'd be the first to pull the plug on myself if I could reach it from my hospital bed. And if not, I'd spend my dying days constructing some kind of MacGuyver-like grabbing instrument.
Your response is very weird to me. I believe most of the people replying to this thread are speaking from the heart based upon very personal experiences. I also believe that we are not debating what anyone else should or should not do, only what we hope to have the ability/freedom to do for ourselves and those that love us.
I don't know about your world, but in mine, I've seen too many elderly that did not plan for their last days. They put that burden on those that loved them.
I've got two people in my extended family that are still suffering the guilt of their mother's death. Even though the woman was well into her 80's before she became ill, she pretended she was going to just die peacefully in her sleep one night. As with most, that was not the case. She has an odd neurological disorder that slowly robbed her of her speech and fine motor skills, then over a period of time all ability to care for herself or communicate.
Her daughter spent tens of thousands of dollars to care for her mother in her own home. Giving herself a stroke because her brother was too freaked by his mother's condition to visit or assist.
After the daughter had her stroke, they resigned themselves to putting the old woman in the best care facility possible. Depleting the old woman's fortune. Everyone avoided, put off, visiting. Sitting and holding the hand of a crying old woman that couldn't communicate why she was crying.
Her final days were spent screaming, open mouthed and hollow eyed, in pain, until she was so sedated she slowed faded away. That woman's last few years of life were of no joy to her, or to those that loved her. Her last two weeks of life cost several hundred thousand dollars of intensive care and private nursing. All because she was selfish and made ZERO plans for her end days. Her son is spending his retirement drinking himself to death and her daughter is avoiding all family functions that remind her of her mother and spending her own retirement gambling her life savings away. All because of guilt and inability to deal with their mother's death.
That family has always been totally freaked about death and dying. I have watched for twenty years what that old woman and her views about the loss her her first husband decades ago, her son decades ago, her second husband a few years before her death and then her own illness and death, did to them.
I will do everything in my power to avoid doing the same to the people I love.
_____________________________
My twisted, self deprecating, sense of humour, finds alot to laugh about, in your lack of one!
Just because you are well educated, articulate, and can use big, fancy words, properly........does not mean you are right!
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