Taking responsibility and having faith in your own judgment will help you make good choices and decisions at the end of your pet's life.
One day I met a lady who was dying of cancer in a most terrible condition. And I told her, I say, "You know, this terrible pain is only the kiss of Jesus - a sign that you have come so close to Jesus on the cross that he can kiss you."
He had never looked forward to the wisdom and other vaunted benefits of old age. Would he be able to die young—and if possible free of all pain? A graceful death—as a richly patterned kimono, thrown carelessly across a polished table, slides unobtrusively down into the darkness of the floor beneath. A death marked by elegance.
Social reform is the desperate decision to remove corns from a person suffering from cancer.
I am proposing that every person over sixty-five years of age be spared the darkness of sickness without hope.
I believe it should be possible for someone stricken with a serious and ultimately fatal illness to choose to die peacefully with medical help, rather than suffer.
The art of living well and the art of dying well are one.
I know that there are people who believe that if they get to the stage where life is absolutely intolerable because of pain and indignity... they would like to end their life before nature intended, and we think they should have the choice to do so.
I think we're rapidly approaching the day where medical science can keep people alive in hospitals, hooked up to tubes and things, far beyond when any kind of quality of life is left at all.
I had nothing to do with death panels. I thought it was a horrible phrase about end of life. I didn't think it was accurate, and I was - I've always been opposed to it. The reason why I stood behind that phrase "death tax" for so many years is because the only time that you could pay that tax, the only time, is on the death of a relative. And that's what makes it a death tax. You have to be accurate.
When I came to this country in 1958, to be a dying patient in a medical hospital was a nightmare. You were put in the last room, furthest away from the nurses' station. You were full of pain, but they wouldn't give you morphine. Nobody told you that you were full of cancer and that it was understandable that you had pain and needed medication.
That term was used with hyperbole about the parts of the health care bill where doctors are mandated, if people are on Medicare and of a certain age or in serious physical condition, to counsel them on their end-of-life alternatives. I don't believe that was a death panel.
When my parents died they both were 47, and they died of complications of different diseases; one being diabetes.
A terminal diagnosis can really mess with your head. Honestly, it makes you want to run away to the moon. Many ALS patients want to fade away quietly. This was not for me.
Precisely in an age when the inviolable rights of the person are solemnly proclaimed and the value of life is publicly affirmed, the very right to life is being denied or trampled upon, especially at the more significant moments of existence: the moment of birth and the moment of death.
When a poor person dies I want then to die in the arms of somebody who loves them. I want them to be able to look for the last time into the eyes of somebody who cares for them
While the Church exhorts civil authorities to seek peace, not war, and to exercise discretion and mercy in imposing punishment on criminals, it may still be permissible to take up arms to repel an aggressor or to have recourse to capital punishment. There may be a legitimate diversity of opinion even among Catholics about waging war and applying the death penalty, but not however with regard to abortion and euthanasia.
I am dying with the help of too many physicians.
Organ donation is very personal to me. My mother, before her death, was on kidney dialysis for several years.
Politicians, please, think of yourselves! Move to help Terri Schiavo, and no one will be mad at you, and you'll keep a human being alive.
I'm trying to die correctly, but it's very difficult, you know.
My mother, who was radiant, young, and beautiful even as she lay dying, heard voices and saw visions, but she always managed to make friends with them and was much too charming to hospitalize even at her craziest.
In working with those who are dying, I offer another human being a spacious environment with my mind in which they can die as they need to die. I have no right to define how another person should die. I'm just there to help them transition, however they need to do it.
I've been there for a couple of people when they were dying; it didn't look like fun. But if I was gonna do it, I'd want someone like me around. And I will be there!
How good we all are, in theory, to the old; and how in fact we wish them to wander off like old dogs, die without bothering us, and bury themselves.
