Nearly everyone hopes for a peaceful death; yet such an end can be elusive. Many of us face both philosophical and practical questions as we do what we can to make our own deaths peaceful.
Some of us may have religious questions. Judaism, like many other religions, is all over the map in its thinking about ways to achieve a peaceful death.
Two years ago, a book of thirty essays supporting the right to assisted death edited by Colin Brewer and Michael Irwin, was published by Skyscraper Publications, Ltd. Most of the essays make arguments familiar to Americans involved in the right-to-die movement, but often with a European (and British) take that makes them fresh. Others tell first-person stories that are as riveting as any heard in the US.
A recent article in USA Today, relates the story of a 64-year old Oregon woman with early onset Alzheimer’s disease, who is now in an assisted living center. She will eventually die from complications of the disease, but the State of Oregon is doing everything it can to make sure that Nora Harris doesn’t die until she has suffered through the disease until her “natural” death.
In May 2015, the non-profit corporation Final Exit Network, Inc. was convicted of assisting in the 2007 suicide of Doreen Dunn. In that state, “assisting” does not require any physical act. The Minnesota Supreme Court decided that if speaking to another person about how to commit suicide “enables” that person to take her own life, the speech meets the definition of “assist” as found in the Minnesota statute that prohibits “assisting suicide.”
