The San Francisco Chronicle: Have you thought about dying lately? I don’t mean in some morbid, obsessive way, I mean in a practical sense. Have you thought about dying? It’s going to happen to you, just you wait. And the odds are that it will not happen suddenly. You probably will have plenty of time to contemplate a good death.
Do you know what a good death is? It’s not any one thing; it depends on your standards, your priorities, your belief system. Would you like, say, a bronze statue of a grieving woman labeled “Humanity” on your grave site? Perhaps not; perhaps that’s too grandiose.
But if it isn’t – where is the money going to come from? You’d think dying is something that could be done on the cheap, but not really. Something respectful has to be done with human bodies. It’s the law. You can’t just leave them lying around the house. There are sanitation issues.
How badly do you want to be kept alive? Can you think of any benchmarks? Do you know what the implications of those decisions are? Someone is going to have to carry out those wishes. Have you talked to anybody about it? You may know your wishes, but if no one else does, what good does it do you?
Dying is a social act.