My Plan to Avoid the Ravages of Extreme Dementia

By Norman L. Cantor

The first signs of my friend Gertie’s descent into dementia were mild — confusion about days of the week and memory loss about recent events. These were troubling but understandable phenomena in my then 84 year-old friend. Aging inevitably entails some cognitive decline. Over time, though, her symptoms of mental deterioration worsened — disinterest in pursuits like reading and listening to music that had once occupied and entertained her, forgetting not just long-time friends, but even her devoted husband who had died years earlier, and obsessive repetition of certain thoughts and phrases. Now 89, Gertie barely recognizes the devoted caregivers around her. She cannot recall her distant or recent past, she no longer knows who or where she is. Gertie remains physically tenacious, with no life-threatening maladies. While dependent on assistance for dressing, eating, ambulating, bathing, and toileting, Gertie may continue in her mentally detached and dysfunctional limbo for years more.

I am determined to avoid Gertie’s fate. So I am now contemplating how to respond if and when I am diagnosed with early Alzheimer’s. My prime object is to avoid the precipitous mental deterioration accompanying advanced Alzheimer’s or similar dementia. My aversion is not based on prospective emotional distress and suffering. While some people in sharp mental decline may experience anxiety, frustration, embarrassment, confusion, or agitation, some, like Gertie, seem placid and indifferent to their debilitation. My aversion is grounded rather in my abhorrence of reduced mental function to a degree I deem intolerably demeaning. Such a status is unacceptable to me whether or not I would experience distress in a future demented state.

Keep in mind that I spent my work career as an academic. My personal satisfaction and self-image have flowed largely from intellectual functions like observation, reflection, and analysis. Inability to understand and process information is, for me, an intolerably undignified status. This preoccupation with future mental dysfunction reflects unwillingness to soil the lifetime image to be left with my survivors. I care mightily about posthumous recollections of my personality and I seek to shape my life trajectory (including a dying process) in a way that preserves a modicum of dignity.

I am not alone in a strong concern with prospective indignity associated with mental decline. Ezekiel Emanuel, a noted physician and ethics commentator, has expressed a determination to avoid the diminished function of a person over age 75. For him, his survivors’ recollection of his persona as “feeble, ineffectual, even pathetic” (at age 75 and beyond) would represent degradation that would indelibly soil his lifetime image. My own vision of intolerable indignity is not grounded in advanced age or physical decay, but rather in sharp intellectual deterioration thwarting my understanding and interacting with my surroundings. I also feel distaste for becoming a physical burden on others via necessary assistance in mobility, bathing, dressing, eating, and toileting. But my vision of intolerable indignity relates mainly to intellectual dysfunction. I wish to avoid incapacity to process information to a degree that renders me incompetent to make major life decisions such as where to live and whether to receive life-sustaining medical intervention.

Not everyone shares my extreme revulsion toward an end-of-life period immersed in mental dysfunction. Some people are resigned to subsisting under Alzheimer’s ravages (if and when such dementia comes) and they focus on advance planning aimed at treating their future incompetent persona humanely and in line with their (the planners’) values and preferences. For example, a person while still competent can designate a trusted agent to make future decisions and can express preferences about certain choices like type of living arrangement. (E.g., a wish to remain in home-based care as long as possible or a wish for group living as opposed to burdening a loved one). This advance planning can speak not only to residential locus, but also to type, extent, and financing of future medical care. Compassion and Choices, an organization focused on death with dignity, offers a model directive for treatment (or non-treatment) of someone stricken with Alzheimer’s or other dementia.

My own preference, at least after a definitive diagnosis of Alzheimer’s is received, is never to reach the mentally debilitated stage when I am no longer in charge of my fate. Rather, I plan to engineer my self-deliverance (to use a euphemism for suicide as is appropriate to someone stricken with a fatal affliction accelerating their own demise) while still competent to do so. This will be my course as long as no reliable therapies are available.

My plan raises an exquisite timing dilemma. Like the vast majority of people, I have a powerful will to live and a capacity to adjust to changing circumstances, including deteriorating circumstances. In the early stages of dementia, I expect to retain both mental capacity to shape my own fate and sufficient intellectual satisfaction to warrant continued existence. At the same time, self-deliverance demands a firm mental resolve that may be eroded by increasing dementia. A hazard is that the drive to live will prevail to a point when the mental capacity no longer exists to carry out my preferred course of self-deliverance. (From that point on, I, like every mentally debilitated person, would be dependent on a surrogate decision maker’s adherence to instructions articulated while I was still mentally competent. I will explain more later about the post-competence fate of a person who slips into incompetency before executing a planned self-deliverance, but who has previously expressed a desire to avoid the extreme dysfunction of advanced Alzheimer’s.)

Timing is not the only dilemma that will face me as an early Alzheimer’s patient seeking to avoid the descent into advanced dementia. The means of self-arranged death poses a further difficulty. I am repulsed by the violent and often gruesome methods used to commit suicide – like guns, razors, and leaps from great heights. Such methods don’t fulfill my conception of a modicum of dignity in dying. And they entail not only significant failure rates, but also the hazard of leaving the person seeking to die lingering on in a worsened state.

Various right-to-die organizations suggest less taxing means of self-deliverance. The most common method is ingestion of a lethal drug leading to unconsciousness within minutes and death within hours. This requires selecting and accessing an effective barbiturate or opioid (as opposed to simply overdosing on sleeping pills and thus risking either waking up post-overdose or regurgitating the pills). The appropriate drugs are highly controlled substances usually available only by prescription. Most physicians won’t prescribe or furnish lethal substances that might generate regulatory inquiries about assisting suicide. Note that even in states that have legalized assisted suicide, the authorization to supply a lethal substance does not apply to an early-stage alzheimer’s patient; that patient doesn’t meet the criterion of terminal illness (death likely within 6 months) needed for authorized provision of a lethal substance. Reliance on internet or foreign suppliers of a lethal substance carries a risk of fraud and /or violations of legal regulations. Beyond the challenge of obtaining the lethal substance, additional hurdles loom. To avoid the complications occasionally associated with lethal drug ingestion (primarily vomiting), an anti-emetic may be a desirable precaution. Again, some medical guidance is appropriate. Perhaps I (or you) can find a physician friend or a retired medical person willing to offer clandestine guidance in obtaining and using an appropriate lethal drug. I haven’t yet lined up the requisite medical back-up for exit by poison and I am meanwhile weighing other options.

Another means of self-arranged death suggested by right-to-die advocates is called the helium method. A properly equipped patient who breathes in helium will lapse into unconsciousness within seconds and die within a half hour. The requisite equipment is not hard to obtain via hardware and party supply stores – a small tank of helium, a plastic hood (large roasting bag), and plastic tubing. The failure rate with a properly assembled helium hood is very low and instructive videos are readily available. Advocates acknowledge, though, that many people seeking self-deliverance are deterred from the helium method. I am one of them, having no confidence in my mechanical skills in arranging even the relatively simple helium apparatus in question. So while I don’t find the vision of a helium hood and a short period of gasping to be excessively distressful or undignified, I am unlikely to employ that methodology.

Another supposedly painless and reliable means of self-arranged death is called “ligature compression.” This involves applying and twisting a tourniquet to press the carotid arteries in one’s neck. This technique stops the flow of oxygenated blood to the brain and leads to fainting and death. I am not likely to be using ligature compression in my role as an early Alzheimer’s patient seeking to hasten death. I would again be worried about my mechanical skill in arranging and twisting the tourniquet in a fashion that maintains pressure on the carotids while avoiding the windpipe and associated choking.

So how will I accomplish my own demise if I reject the most commonly used and recommended methods of self-arranged death like drugs and helium? My current leaning, based on research and reflection, is to stop eating and drinking (SED). Strict cessation of nutrition and hydration will typically result in death within 10 to 14 days. The dehydration impacts brain function so that the person who stops eating and drinking will lapse into unconsciousness over the first 5 to 8 days. After several more days, the dehydration prompts death by cardiac malfunction and arrest.

While the SED process can theoretically be accomplished alone and requires only resolve to resist initial feelings of hunger and thirst, it makes great sense to enlist some help to provide palliative or comfort care during the process. Such palliative care greatly reduces any chance that SED will be a torturous process. I plan to employ a home health aide capable of performing tasks like keeping mouth and lips moist (to avoid cracked lips and to help overcome thirst), maintaining oral cleanliness (to avoid fungal infections), and administering sedation (to cope with delirium or agitation that sometimes occurs). This comfort care might also include analgesics or anti-emetics if there is any underlying condition that necessitates pain relief or nausea control.

For me, the cessation of eating and drinking offers a reasonably peaceful, painless, and dignified enough way to accelerate death. Any spectre of an agonizing death by starvation is dispelled by lots of anecdotal evidence in the context of degenerative disease patients facing protracted and distasteful dying processes who resorted to SED. These include advanced cancer patients as well as others stricken with ALS, Parkinson’s Disease, or M.S. Many fatally stricken medical patients have opted for SED to cut short a protracted and emotionally draining dying process that has become personally intolerable. That also would be my prerogative as a victim of Alzheimer’s.

Does SED constitute suicide and would my home health aides be vulnerable to charges of assisting suicide by cooperating with my death by dehydration? There is an overtone of suicide present because a fasting patient is initiating a fatal course (death by dehydration) with the specific intent to die. Nonetheless, many legal and medical commentators view SED and its assistance as a perfectly legal course in the context of a competent person stricken with a fatal malady. Such a stricken patient is clearly entitled to forgo or detach any life-sustaining ventilation, dialysis, blood transfusions, or antibiotics; and the patient’s wish to die does not convert the acceleration of death to suicide. The stricken patient is legally permitted to manage medical intervention in order to control the timing of an unavoidable death.

A fatally stricken patient using SED is similarly invoking concepts of bodily integrity, self-determination, and dignity. That patient is resisting forced feeding or medically initiated nutrition and hydration in order to avoid or shorten an intolerable stage of a degenerative condition.

The commentators asserting that SED is a lawful variation of resistance to unwanted medical intervention cannot rely on any authoritative ruling by an upper level court because such courts have not addressed the issue. However, rulings by lower courts in the U.S., Canada, and Australia have upheld the prerogative of a patient invoking SED to resist any forced intervention. This legal support is a natural outcome, given sympathy with the plight of fatigued, fatally stricken patients and revulsion at the prospect of restraints to overcome a competent patient’s will and bodily integrity. A right-to-die organization like Compassion and Choices may be exaggerating slightly in asserting that SED is “well established by law,” but their claim of legality is still basically sound.

A more sobering claim sometimes made against SED is that it is an excessively undignified dying process. Critics point to the overall duration (up to 2 and 1/2 weeks), the erosion of mental clarity (delirium flowing from dehydration), and several days of unconscious lingering as dehumanizing and humiliating. SED, they claim, also imposes “a horrible vigil” on surrounding family watching the wasting or unconscious patient die. In lawsuits brought by dying patients challenging laws against assisted suicide, plaintiffs depict SED as a protracted ordeal for both patients and family.

I have read several anecdotal reports in which an SED dying process is described by observers as brutal. These negative accounts are usually explainable by absence of precautions such as sedatives for patient agitation or analgesics for preexisting pathologies afflicting the fasting patient. Sometimes, surrounding family members find the death watch to be hard and the patient can be distressed by this hardship imposed on loved ones.

My personal assessment is that SED is not an intolerably undignified, stressful, or prolonged process. That the process demands firm resolve on the part of the fasting individual seems appropriate to the fateful, somber circumstances. The dying person’s opportunity to reflect and retract is for me a positive aspect of the process. Mental disruption in the form of delirium or agitation can be managed with sedatives. A period of insensate lingering may not be ideal, but this is akin to the natural dying process that often occurs for end-stage medical patients. Patients dying of degenerative conditions like cancer or heart disease frequently lapse into coma as a form of natural anesthesia at the end stage. Several days of unconsciousness does not seem to me like an intolerable affront to dignity, as opposed to a permanently vegetative state or protracted coma in which unconsciousness continues for months or years.

The duration of an SED dying process over 10 to 14 days seems tough compared with the rapidity of ingestion of a fatal drug. Keep in mind, though, that even in jurisdictions that allow assisted suicide by prescription drugs, the process extends over weeks or months. There, procedural safeguards, including mandated periods for a patient’s medical examination, consultation, reflection, and reaffirmation, dictate that the process is a protracted one.

Of course a death watch can be traumatic for those surrounding the fasting patient and witnessing a loved one accelerating their own demise by rejecting food and drink. Final leave takings are by their nature hard. I will not expect attendance by anyone around me who finds the process too arduous. I will not even inform anyone who seems too delicate or vulnerable. I regret the prospect of emotional suffering for anyone who undertakes my death watch, but it doesn’t alter my resolve. For me, an important consolation is knowledge that through SED I will be sparing future caregivers years of burdensome and stressful watch over a highly debilitated persona (an advanced Alzheimer’s patient) who I refuse to become.

An important question is why “rush” to self-deliverance while still competent, thereby risking a premature demise while still enjoying life and with potential for additional satisfaction. Why not prepare advance instructions regarding a post-competence fate and then depend on a carefully chosen surrogate decision maker to ensure one’s demise well before reaching the depths of advanced Alzheimer’s? My first response is that I don’t want to subsist in a mentally deteriorated state (incompetent to make important decisions) even if that status might be described for some period as “pleasantly” deranged. Therefore, my Plan A is to self-deliver while still competent, at some stage of early Alzheimer’s. Another response is that reliance on surrogate decision making to accelerate my post-competence demise is a very uncertain and problematic path.

In theory, a designated health care agent can and should implement whatever advance health care instructions I lay out. So I can express in advance my distaste for subsistence in a demented state and dictate that no life-sustaining medical intervention should take place post-competency. My directive can explicitly reject not only mechanical intervention like a ventilator, but also simplistic medical steps like antibiotics for infections or artificial nutrition (an i.v.) for swallowing or digestive disorders. I am willing to assume that statutory constrictions in certain states’ health care decisions acts (limiting surrogate end-of-life medical decisions to “terminally ill” patients) would not pose an obstacle to implementation of my instructions for medical handling. Such statutes are not intended to constrict common-law prerogatives to shape one’s post-competence medical fate. Nonetheless, this course relying on advance instructions to a health care agent is not, for me, satisfactory. Multiple variables and hurdles stand in the way of surrogate rejection of life-extending medical intervention as an expeditious path to post-competence death.

For starters, the occurrence of potentially life-threatening disease or infection is largely fortuitous, a matter of happenstance. As Alzheimer’s runs its course, periodic infections may arise from conditions like incontinence, swallowing difficulties, immobility, and reduced immune response. But years could go by before an infection or some other potentially fatal malady sets in. As noted, I don’t wish to subsist as a mentally debilitated, incompetent person at all, let alone one lingering for years in that status.

Some people shaping their post-competence medical fate seek to overcome the happenstance of illness timing by instructing their health care agent to initiate a post-competence SED process – i.e., surrogate cessation of nutrition and hydration (the technique I plan to employ while still competent). A typical provision instructs future caregivers not to offer food or water or tube feeding to the now-incompetent patient once a designated stage of mental decline has been reached. The underlying theory seems to be that a competent person’s right to SED can be exercised post-competency by a surrogate decision maker who has been so instructed.

I have serious doubts that surrogate-initiated SED offers a viable technique for abbreviating a person’s unwanted, seriously demented existence. Recall that the exercise of SED (even by a competent person) requires a resolute will and back-up by a palliative caregiver capable of dealing with sedatives and analgesics. At a post-competency stage, the Alzheimer’s patient may well have forgotten her prior determination to avoid indignity and may well be experiencing modest satisfactions in life with no sense of degradation; she is not perceptibly suffering. Under such circumstances, the designated agent, surrounding family, and the attending palliative care provider may have serious compunctions about engineering SED and causing the ostensibly content individual to die from dehydration. Even if the now-incompetent patient previously dictated this course by explicit directive, caregivers tend to associate food and water with care and compassion and may well be uncomfortable implementing prior SED instructions for a helpless, ostensibly content person who has no recollection of her prior resolve. The now-incompetent patient may at this stage be willingly accepting food and may even request food or drink if that is withheld. Causing hunger or frustration to the hapless, uncomprehending patient by surrogate-initiated SED seems inhumane (though sedatives would be available as a palliative measure). And the patient’s current willingness to eat might be viewed as a de facto revocation of the advance directive to withhold food and drink. (Implementation of an SED advance directive would be even more problematic in the several states whose legislation appears to ban withdrawal of oral nutrition from incompetent patients or in cases when the patient is now located in a nursing home or institution that has conscientious objections to cessation of hand feeding).

My current thinking, then, is that in order to avoid years of intolerably undignified dementia, I will have to arrange my own death – probably by SED – while I still have the capacity to carry it out. Some people might deem this course an immoral deprivation of my prospective future persona’s potential for a modestly pleasurable existence in a demented status that might not be experienced as degrading and undignified. I have no qualms about the morality of my foreclosing a future demented life. As an adult, I have nurtured and developed a character and a life image. I have earned the prerogative of avoiding an intolerably undignified existence even if my future persona would not be palpably suffering in that condition. My life narrative belongs to me, not my hypothetical future persona.

8 thoughts to “My Plan to Avoid the Ravages of Extreme Dementia”

  1. A well-argued position on self-deliverance. But the self-starvation and dehydration method requires considerable courage and determination, even with pain control and good nursing. Would a person with early-stage dementia have this sustained resolve? Perhaps.

  2. Your analysis of the issue is excellent, and I agree that SED is the “best” choice currently available (which does not make it a good choice, but the law does not allow any good choices here). One major downside, however, is that since it requires a strong resolve over a two-week period, it would have to be done much sooner than a shorter method, and one might have to sacrifice months of otherwise acceptable life in order to accomplish it. It is also very difficult to judge how long to wait, since it is difficult or impossible to measure when cognitive clarity is diminishing to the point where it threatens the capacity to keep ones resolve over a two-week period. It makes me very angry that the law forces us into such draconian choices in what is supposed to be a free society but in this area is anything but free.

  3. I applaud your intellectual fortitude and honesty in analyzing your options for a self-determined death — and your decision to devise and execute a well thought-out plan to achieve the end that you desire. Your choice of how you wish to end your life has been shaped over a lifetime by your life choices, and by your acceptance of the reality that death is not to be feared, but is an essential component of the natural life-cycle of all living creatures — and actually essential for the preservation of the species! Many surveys over the years have clearly shown that the most significant causative factor of people who choose to end their life on their own terms — and at a time of their own choosing — is “LOSS OF CONTROL” — loss of self autonomy!
    Although loss of dignity is incredibly important, it is actually the
    final insult to the persona of the person facing — and recognizning — a protracted dying process in which they have absolutely no input, much less actual control.

    have had intense personal experience with both aspects of dying that you so eloquently described: My first wife had Alzheimer’s for 19 years — yes, and incredible journey — as she progrsssed slowly through all stages of the disease process for 14 years, including inability to talk, feed herself, incontinence … all the clasical stages of dying from dementia — but she had a minor stroke 15 years into the disease process that left her totally paralyzed for the last 4 years, during which time she had to be treated much like a person in a persistant vegitative state. I watched helplessly as her body physically survived but her persona was totally gone … and it was a merciful act of nature that she finally succumbed to a massive stroke.

    My second wife developed Fronto-Temporal Dementia (FD) 7 years into our relationship. FTD is significantly different from Alzheimer’s in that the memory, both short and long term, remains essentially intact until the very late stages, and my wife was cognitively intact and responsive to all means of communication until the moment of her death — although she was totally mute and unable to communicate verbally or via written or computer generated means for the last 4 years of her life, fortunately, we had devised a method of signals using her eyes to indicate ‘yes’ or ‘no’ so we had an effective means of communicateion until literally just 2 minutes before she took her last breath.

    Ultimately, she experienced a relatively minor stroke, but one that completely paralyzed her thoat, so that the could not swallow — even her own saliva . She lived exactly 13 days … during which she had absolutely NO food or liquid, and died of acute dehydration the afternoon of her 13th day. She was awake, alert, and cognizant of her condition and surroundings the entire time. My second wife developed Fronto-Temporal Dementia (FD) 7 years into our relationship. Within 3 years sge lost her ability to talk, then became unable to feed or dress herself, and eventually became incontinent. But I kept her at home for the first 2 years.

    FTD is significantly different from Alzheimer’s in that the memory, both short and long term, remains essentially intact until the very late stages, and my wife was cognitively intact and responsive to all means of communication until the moment of her death – although she was totally mute and unable to communicate verbally or via written or computer generated means for the last 4 years of her life, but fortunately, we had devised a method of signals using her eyes to indicate ‘yes’ or ‘no’ so we had an effective means of communicateion until literally just 2 minutes before she took her last breath.

    Ultimately, she experienced a relatively minor stroke, but one that completely paralyzed her thoat, so that the could not swallow – even her own saliva . She lived exactly 13 days … during which she had absolutely NO food or liquid, and died of acute dehydration the afternoon of her 13th day. She was awake, alert, and cognizant of her condition and surroundings the entire time. She did not show any indication whatever that she had any pain anywhere,and I felt blessed that she died peacefully and relatively quickly, exactly as she had hoped for and expressed a few months after her diagnosis.

    I would welcome any inquiries you may have. kenfousel@earthlink.net.

  4. “Strict cessation of nutrition and hydration will typically result in death within 10 to 14 days.” Indeed, it usually should, BUT: “The dehydration impacts brain function so that the person who stops eating and drinking will lapse into unconsciousness over the first 5 to 8 days” – The moment you are in a helpless state any doctor or other medical personnel will put you on a “drip” and try to resuscitate and rehydrate you. If everything backfired completely, you might then not only have dementia but kidney trouble too … Let me comment some of you taken-for-granted statement: “Aging inevitably entails some cognitive decline.” NO. There is ample evidence that while certain faculties get slower, other plus lifetime experience become more acute and make more than up for that “loss”. “… diminished function of a person over age 75 …” Well – this is priceless. There is a martial arts instructor in Germany currently being quoted all over the place – he is 90 and no one believes he’s over 60, when they see him. “… I am meanwhile weighing other options. …” NO, you are NOT. You simply believe, as many do, that with old age there cometh decay. There is no medical/biological proof for that, only statistics. And these rely on people who give themselves up, often around the age of THIRTY! “… as long as no reliable therapies are available.” But there are! If life-long usage of normal body functions (! – normal!) can count as therapy even. “My personal satisfaction and self-image have flowed largely from intellectual functions like observation, reflection, and analysis” If that were TRULY so, then … you would have come to the conclusions expounded by me above yourself! Senescence is a function of bodily decay which follows decades of abuse, misuse and UNuse of the body. Our brains have about one neuron for every muscle fiber they have to enervate. Let these go and your brain will shrink. It is not only since Feldenkrais but at least since the Romans (“Mens sana in corpore sano”) that we as a race know that the body needs to be “keep in shape”. That is not “running for the shelter” of a doctor’s prescription. You have to work out, but not aerobically only, you have to do e.g. pullups, pushups, situps etc. If everyone for the rest of their lives did keep up with the US Marines’ entry level personal fitness obligations (which are not that difficult to match, not even for elderly women – allow two years of training, that’s about all), then you would die of old age in the sense that as a healthy, mentally fully alert being you would just not wake up one day. You could lift your great grand children and never need a walking stick, never an old people’s home and no one to carry your shopping! Main requisite: eat enough protein and calcium, as the muscles need protein to grow and to keep up and your bones need the calcium to reverse or keep at bay potential osteoporosis (which is not a function of hormone depletion – I know a lot of power lifter aged 70 and older who can outcompete 25 year olds easily. Their bone density is better than that of the average 25 year old couch potato!).

    1. Maureen, your comments apply to taking care of oneself and avoiding dementia. That, for me, is the optimal goal for my life, but what if I am diagnosed with dementia? Dementia has no cure and the process of decline is certain. I would like the option for choosing death over decay and degradation over many years. I watched my mother slowly disappear over many, many years slowly dying at 93 with dementia and now my father (96). Their lives are/were wretched. I do not want that nor that my family endure it.

  5. A small correction and an update. Correction is that there is no “gasping” in using the helium method. You are breathing normally, and pass out from Hypoxia, not asphyxiation. Second, an update, The major suppliers of helium are now adding air to their tanks due to the worldwide shortage of helium. While this is fine for balloons, it is terrible for self deliverance and should not be used. Pure nitrogen is the preferred substitute, which performs exactly the same as helium, and provides a quick, peaceful death. Nitrogen is readily available through local suppliers. Argon or neon may also be substituted.

  6. I come from a long line of people with Alzheimer’s so I expect my deteriorating cognition is an early sign. I am a reader and a writer at my core. But I am losing my words. I don’t recognize people I see every day.
    However, SED would never work for me, because I like eating too much. I even joke with my family, not to be surprised if I sit up in my coffin and ask for something from the repast, like a couple Nanaimo bars (so rich and delectable), one to eat right away and one to take with me for the journey. Heck, I even dream about food. I have a recurring dream of a great banquet with tables all laden with a great variety of wonderful foods, and just as I sit down and am about to take my first bite…I wake up.
    It just hit me. Maybe the real banquet is on the other side.
    But the method. How to get there before I become an I don’t-know-what who can’t walk or talk or remember my own name. That is the question. I only wish I knew the answer.

  7. Gratified to come across this website. I’m 79 and my extensive vocabulary is declining, yet I can still write cogently, and oddly I’m able to articulate some complex ideas previously not accessible. With a background in graduate level social psychology I’m more aware than most of societal determination of thoughts and values. We primates fear ostracism more than death itself, and it limits the scope of thought – now less restrictive as the end approaches

    My wife and I only have each other, so self deliverance would be abandoning her. What would be worse is that there is a cultural opprobrium against suicide, which makes finding the right time difficult. The LA Times just published four full pages on what is known as a Ventilation Farm “Identity and consciousness” https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-08-01/sixty-six-garage-unconscious-and-anonymous-for-17-years

    This was my letter to the editor:
    The writer states in the podcast , “…and then there’s the woman down the hall with dementia who moans for help every evening.” This patient would be put out of her misery if nature were allowed to take it’s course, rather than taxpayers contributing a quarter million dollars a year for each of these patients, either in oblivion or worse,
    agonizing emotional suffering.

    This is only justified based on ecclesiastic dogma such as, ” Life is always worth living until the day that God calls us home.” There is no rational or humanistic explanation for public funds to be used to finance perpetuation of a life devoid of love, laughter and thought.
    —————
    I’m working with Faye Gersh of the San Diego Hemlock Group, and we agree that legal and social norms must be changed so the fear to the above outcome does not lead to premature suicide, but when the biological reality is such, it need not be made more difficult by stigma. I won’t get formal medical evaluation as this inherently causes a loss of autonomy exacerbating suffering. Aside: Medicare no longer pays for brain scans as they are non deterministic of prognosis

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