Quotes About End-of-life

I believe it should be possible for someone stricken with a serious and ultimately fatal illness to choose to die peacefully with medical help, rather than suffer.

Have you ever thought about those last moments of your life? Nobody wants a long, lingering illness; nobody wants just that; but it would be nice if you could have a day or two where you know it's coming.

Indeed, during their final days the terminally ill are often said to be almost living in two worlds, swapping nonchalantly between chatting with palliative carers and family physically present in the room, and interacting with visions of previously deceased individuals who appear to be – in some way – there to help them through the dying process.

To the extent that I have control over my cause of death, avoiding a heart-disease death, an aneurysm death, or a cancer death isn't my top priority. I'm more concerned about suffering a lingering cognitive decline in a long-term-care facility. And

Oregon is the only state in the union that facilitates suicide.

By what logical principle should the relief of death be granted only the terminally ill? Such a restriction is itself perverse. After all, the terminally ill face only a brief period of suffering. The chronically ill, or the healthy but bereft—they face a lifetime of agony. Why deny them the relief of a humane exit?

And it was back in the mid-1980s, and as I point out in a piece, that was when we are spending about eight percent of our gross domestic product on health care. And even then, we had the impression that so much of the excessive, aggressive medical treatment that took place at the end of life was not only unnecessary but it was cruel.

Openness about death has led to greater care about all aspects of dying.

she will die the way all old people in America die . . . from humiliation, incontinence, boredom, and neglect.

And yet it has been estimated that in the developed world, 75 per cent of our lifetime medical costs are incurred in the last six months of our lives. This is the price of hope, hope which, by the laws of probability, is so often unrealistic. And thus we often end up inflicting both great suffering on ourselves and unsustainable expense on society.

The practice of euthanasia, under some circumstances, is morally required by the two most widely regarded principles that guide medical practice: respect for patient autonomy and promoting patient's best interests. In the Netherlands and Belgium active euthanasia may be carried out within the law.

Nobody touches you after seventy except doctors, as a rule. A sister, if you're lucky enough to have one. Undertakers.

Oh, the things she would say if she could--but it's a minefield of courtesies and manners, this dying business.

The patient decides when it's best to go.

Voluntary euthanasia occurs only when, to the best of medical knowledge, a person is suffering from an incurable and painful or extremely distressing condition. In these circumstances one cannot say that to choose to die quickly is obviously irrational.

Legal, regulated voluntary euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide have far less potential for abuse, and when they are available, there is no need to make it easy for people to find out how to kill themselves.

When my mother was near death at age ninety she told me that she was ready to die but could not. "You and Jim need me," she said. My brother and I were by then in our sixties.

My aim in helping the patient was not to cause death. My aim was to end suffering. It's got to be decriminalized.

When all usefulness is over, when one is assured of an unavoidable and imminent death, it is the simplest of human rights to choose a quick and easy death in place of a slow and horrible one.

I'm trying to knock the medical profession into accepting its responsibilities, and those responsibilities include assisting their patients with death.

It is the doctors who desert the dying and there is so much to be learned about pain.

Illness and death are not optional. Patients have a right to determine how they approach them.

To a dying person you can repeat yourself forever. They don't care. Just so they can still hear you talking.

Involuntary euthanasia – This is the most controversial way of hastened death, yet it goes on widely and secretly everywhere. Only the Dutch admit to it. It is sometimes necessary when a patient is suddenly, unexpectedly dying in agony, cannot communicate their wishes, and so the attending doctor administers a merciful end.