From ABC Health and Wellbeing, 21 March 2016:
We can talk about good deaths and bad deaths, cheating death or embracing it, but the one thing that we all seem to reach for is this: when we die, we want to do it our way.
Tony Smith (not his real name) says his mother and father were lucky, if such a word can be used for death.
For while they both experienced long-running, debilitating, and often traumatic health problems in the years before each of them died, when the time came, they died the way they wanted to.
Mr Smith’s father died suddenly in bed from a massive heart attack. His mother chose to be kept comfortable in her final days and hours, no heroic measures undertaken to prolong her life, no resuscitation to bring her back from the brink. She was surrounded by her family as she exited this world at age 78, which was, as Tony says, “on her terms”. Read more.
Bianca Nogrady 