Please allow someone to speak on this subject who is much closer to it than you kids. At 65, my body is starting to fail. Not in any major way yet, but the signs are there. When the time comes that I'm in pain and/or my mind is starting to go so I'm no longer me, I do not wish to be kept alive just so a nursing home can continue to extract money from the estate I'd much rather leave to my heirs.
My mother had a "do not tube feed" order in her file at her nursing home, but when she got so bad that she couldn't eat, guess what? They started tube-feeding her. (Her mind was already about 75% gone, she was calling my wife by my ex's name, whom she hadn't seen in 30 years.) They knew we were 600 miles away and couldn't easily come down there and raise hell. Fortunately she died a week later (from aspirating food, duh!) before we were able to go down and raise hell. But they got the $750 for that extra week.
She had actually tried to die peacefully a year earlier. She'd had a couple of tiny strokes and was starting to have trouble, but she refused to go into a home and stayed in her mobile. One day she had another stroke and fell to the floor. She wasn't unconscious or immobile, but she just lay there very quietly and didn't get up to eat or anything. She was just waiting to die and be done with it. Of course when you live in a mobile park with a bunch of other seniors that ain't gonna happen. By the second morning everybody was asking, "Hey, have you seen Baba Fraggle lately?" Next thing she knew, the cops were breaking her window to get in, and she was stuffed into an ambulance. She had to endure another year of steady degradation and indignity, losing her mind and her body, as well as many thousands of the dollars she wanted Mrs. Fraggle and me and the rest of her descendants to have.
I had an aunt who did it right. When she started slowing down she bought a mobile and set it up out in the middle of nowhere in the Arizona desert where nobody could nanny her. They eventually found her dessicated body lying peacefully in bed.
DNR orders are worthless. As Asguard noted a couple of years ago, no doctor, nurse, EMT or other medical professional has ever been successfully sued for failing to honor a DNR. But they get sued all the time for honoring them.
Besides, after all this vitriol I have to say a kind word about all those nice people like Azzy. They've spent their entire educations and careers learning how to save lives and they often cry when they lose a patient. It goes against their nature to deliberately allow one to die, even if that's what he asked for. The people who ran my mother's nursing home may have been a little larcenous, but I'm sure the nurse's aide who put that tube down her throat was just doing what her heart told her to do.
So "death with dignity" is an uphill battle.
I once read about an African tribe who, in the 20th century, were still a Mesolithic people: nomadic hunter-gatherers. When one of them got too old, he'd start to have trouble keeping up with the rest of the clan. As long as he made it to camp by nightfall, they let it go. But when he couldn't quite get there in time and somebody had to go looking for him, the next morning they held a ceremony. They gave him an ostrich egg full of water (that's a hell of a lot of water), sat him comfortably under a tree with a little food, and then they all said their goodbyes and walked off on their next day's journey.
Ever since, we've had this little pact. "When I'm ready, give my my ostrich egg."
