Good short life, short good death
Posted by Charles Cowling I HAVE wonderful friends … one, from Texas, put a hand on my thinning shoulder, and appeared to study the ground where we were standing. He had flown in to see me. “We need to go buy you a pistol, don’t we?” he asked quietly. He meant to shoot myself with. […]
Roundup
Here’s a roundup of news stories I’ve tweeted in the last fortnight. It looks rather a lot — but I try never to fob you off with quantity at the expense of quality. I hate having my own time wasted, so I try hard not to waste yours. Take your pick and enjoy — or […]
Pulling the plug
I know I go on about this, but I think it important. Long, long life is getting to be a problem. Thirty years ago dying was a relatively brief, often unexpected episode. Clever medics can now prolong it – intolerably and expensively. That last goodbye for most of us just keeps getting put off and […]
Helpers fail, comforts flee
I enjoyed this piece by David Nobbs, creator of Reginald Perrin, in yesterday’s Observer. Here are some extracts. My mother died on 7 August 1995. I didn’t realise, that day, my life had changed … My mother died, as she had lived, unselfishly. After she’d died, my wife Susan and I were just in time […]
Practicalities and suicide pacts
Here’s a highly recommended post over at the Exit blog: Heartache of a death not shared — a helium suicide fails. It discusses this story as reported by the Times: Early one morning in September, William Stanton heard footsteps coming up the stairs of his cottage in Somerset. He knew who it was and panicked. […]
Still, small voice of calm
The novelist Martin Amis has called for euthanasia booths on street corners, where elderly people can end their lives with “a martini and a medal”. The author of Time’s Arrow and London Fields even predicts a Britain torn by internal strife in the 2020s if the demographic timebomb of the ageing population is not tackled […]
Should she or shouldn’t she?
When Charlotte Raven was diagnosed with Huntington’s, an incurable degenerative disease, there seemed only one option: suicide. But would deciding how and when to die really give her back the control she desperately craved? And what about the consequences for her husband and young daughter? In 2006, 18 months after the birth of my baby, […]
