I honestly don't know what the problem with me is. I've had some really rotten luck in my life, but some really good luck too. Lots of people would be thrilled to switch lives with me. I stay extremely miserable almost all the time, though. I've been like that since I was a child. I've tried dozens of meds and therapies and lifestyle changes, from Jesus to hypnosis to ketamine. Nothing helps very much. There are all kinds of weird disorders in my mother's family, so I suspect I have some kind of obscure physical defect that nobody has identified yet.
It's probably something that will look obvious to people living 2 centuries after I'm dead. They'll be like, "Oh, that guy totally had X. We can cure that in a couple of days now. Too bad he was born way back in the 20th century. No wonder the poor SOB offed himself."
I agree with you completely. I have no idea how we got to a place where "responsible" people are expected to plan out their education, their children, their finances, their careers, and their retirement, yet if you plan out how you're going to die, you're a sicko who ought to be locked up and drugged for your own good. I don't get the "only God can end a life" thing, either. First of all, "God" is a strange thing to call an auto accident, metastatic cancer, or a heart attack. There is nothing particularly spiritual or holy about keeling over from a stroke or suffocating in your bed from pneumonia. Unplanned deaths are not somehow better, just as unplanned births aren't. They're just unplanned. The only advantage to surprise death that I can see is that you can spend your life pretending it won't happen. Until it does. And then you leave loose ends everywhere, wills not updated to reflect divorces or remarriages, pets (or dependent humans!) with no one to care for them, family crying that "I never got to tell him . . ." blah blah blah.
And even if you are lucky enough to get all that squared away in time, you still have to put up with a dying process that is not likely to be quick or painless. You can hasten things along by refusing certain treatments, which in practice often includes the administration of food and water. That's a cruel way to go, though. If your pet dog had terminal cancer, would you take away his water bowl and force the poor thing to die of thirst, or would you just take him to the vet and have him put down? If God will allow the family dog to exit the world with peace and dignity, why would he insist that Grandma wither for a week to a month after withdrawal of her feeding tube? That's what "natural" death often amounts to. Purposely starving the old and the sick, while drugging the bejeezus out of them so we can imagine that they don't care.
Just quit it. Quit all of it. Quit pretending that death isn't an ordinary fact of life, quit making believe that forcing someone to struggle on in pain until their vital organ systems crash is not just as morally fraught a choice as allowing them to end their lives on their own terms, or assisting them in doing so if they are physically unable. Quit pathologizing the perfectly-understandable preference for oblivion over relentless, untreatable pain. And for the love of God, quit projecting your own moral agonies onto other people, particularly if you are acting in a professional capacity as a doctor or counselor of some sort. If your patients had wanted a priest, they'd have gone to one. Quit implying (or outright stating) that they are terribly selfish and bad for wanting their lives to end sooner rather than later. If you have actual, hopeful information to impart, then do it. If you have none, then quit blaming your patients for not manufacturing their own hope out of thin air. Death is not always the enemy, to be fought at all times and at all costs. Sometimes it is a friend. If you can't handle that basic fact about the world, then quit counseling other people until you can work out your own issues. Work out your problems with mortality for your own sake as well. You too will have to negotiate a relationship to death, and hopefully you will be permitted some independent agency when you do so.
