My mother Joyce, who's 101, was, for much of her life, a right-to-die activist. A high-school teacher by trade, she taught a class on death and dying at Kennedy High School in Wheaton, Maryland in the 1970s; I take that to be unusual. She had me read Elisabeth Kübler Ross's classic, if problematic book On Death and Dying when I was a teenager, not because I seemed to be about to lose anyone but because she thought every human being needed to think about this.
She talked to me many times about her own wishes, and those of my step-father Richard, who suffered from post-polio syndrome. This was, for myself and my brothers (all three of whom have now passed away) a feature of our particular family. We faced death squarely, talked about it explicitly, knew it to be and accepted it as a fundamental feature of life. My brothers and my step-father are all buried naturally at the family farm where my mother and I live now; I helped dig all the graves, and I lay in them when they were done.
I know what my mother would’ve wanted, when she was 50, or when she was 60, or when she was 70, if she ended up in the condition she is in now. She’s less and less mobile: down to a few steps on a good da...