I've never understood the arguments against assisted suicide. I had a family member pass away recently, but not in those kind of circumstances, you have my sympathies.
Thank you. Condolences on your loss, as well.
The biggest problem is when the person can not choose for her/himself, but then it's not really assisted suicide. Living wills certainly help remove ambiguity as to what the person's wishes would be.
The assisted dying legislation in Canada doesn't accept living wills. My frustration is that I can do the right thing for my cats, if they become afflicted with cancer, or suffer a stroke, or something else that either isn't curable or that I couldn't begin to afford to pay for... but I'm not legally allowed to make provisions for myself, if it turns out that the dementia that has afflicted the immediate two generations before me on my dad's side of the family or the aggressive cancer that has afflicted the previous several generations of women on my mother's side of the family is going to settle on me as the next in line.
The cancer thing is the main reason why I decided over 30 years ago that I would not have children. Several aunts, my mom's mother, and a cousin had had cancer, and some died. My mom was still okay then, and so were my youngest aunt and myself. Now there is just that aunt and me and it's a waiting game, to see if we will escape this. I decided not to risk yet another generation having to go through this. Thank goodness my aunt had boys, and my other cousins are adopted.
We have absolutely no control over our emotional reaction to a loss, unless we are sociopaths. At some point we have to give up some of our feelings and move on with life.
The whole point is: if we base our morals on emotions, then we have no control over our morals. That is why laws are made by sound rational humans. They cannot be based on emotional states of mind.
There are times when dealing with death that a person has to switch off their emotions. I refer to the necessity of dealing with legal matters.
My grandmother's last lucid conversation with me included her begging me to make sure that her body was donated to medical research. That's what was done with her brother and my grandfather. It's what she wanted for herself... and I wasn't allowed to carry that out. She died at home, so legally an autopsy had to be done. The university doesn't accept bodies that have had autopsies.
So we had to scramble to make arrangements with a funeral home, and it turned out that the POS that handled this had all the morality of a used car salesman, trying to upsell, trying to guilt us into what wasn't affordable (nobody expected to have to deal with this, so no money had been set aside), and kept phoning and harassing me to make snap decisions and get him the money NOW.
A friend went with me to the funeral home, and handed me a box of kleenex. She said, "Have a good cry; they're used to it and expect it." I told her that this was a business meeting, and I needed a clear head. I didn't have the time to fall apart there, and knew they would try to take advantage of it if I did.
So in the end, everything was minimal, and my grandmother's ashes are in a box in one of the closets here. My mother always found it creepy that I hadn't had her buried and apparently some other people also find it creepy. But her ashes have sat in some closet or other all these years, and it's been frustrating. I have no idea what to do with them, because I have no idea what she would have found acceptable as a Plan B. None of us anticipated needing a Plan B, so we never talked about it.
