“To be ‘death positive’ doesn’t mean that you are happy about dying.”
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“Whose wishes for his medical treatment were we to honor? Those of my father back when he was a healthy, highly functioning geneticist? Or those of the simpler, weakened man my father had become?”
“Do you ever worry about your own death, feel that life is too short, or dread the day you will lose someone you care about? You are not alone.”
With the assistance of the World Federation of Right to Die Societies and Exit International, I surveyed voluntary assisted dying (VAD) advocates and supporters around the world to inject some much-needed data and objectivity into the VAD debate.
It’s time that we revise and refine our cultural lexicon around this emergent end-of-life practice. A medically assisted death definitively warrants a linguistic and conceptual category of its own.
There is growing research exploring the overwhelming anxiety that the inevitability of death, and our uncertainty about when it will occur, has the power to create. A social psychological theory, called terror management theory (TMT), is one way to understand how this anxiety influences our behaviour and sense of self.
“The rest is up to you,” he finally said, ending the conversation for good. He didn’t have any more guidance, and certainly no more patience to talk about it. I was surprised. To me, it felt slightly irresponsible to leave all these decisions to other people.
Your emotional reaction to a dread disease diagnosis can have major implications for whether your treatment preferences will be accepted.
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