Writing in the BBC News Magazine, writer Will Self has news for you. Here are some extracts:
This may seem rather shocking to you but I am expecting to kill myself.
Really I am, and if you’ll hear me out I hope to at least nudge society in the direction of considering suicide acceptable when – and this is the important point – the alternative is a slow painful death from a terminal illness.
Such is the brilliance of contemporary medical science, at least in our privileged realm, that we can be kept breathing long past the point where our existence is anything save miserable – miserable for us, miserable for our loved ones, and miserable for those who have been appointed by either by the state or a private health plan to minister unto us.
I’ve observed what might be termed a “creeping normalcy” in the existence of the terminally ill – with each successive stage of greater incapacity, indignity and discomfort somehow managing to be incorporated into the daily go-round.
[We] cannot hope to understand how to have a good life, unless we also ready ourselves for a good death.
Read it all here.
Hat-tip: Jed
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