In the current issue of THE HUMANIST magazine there is a fine article about a man with early stage Alzheimer’s taking his life with the guidance of the Final Exit Network.
The End by: Nontheist
Published in the September/October 2013 Humanist
Extract:
That final day had been a long time coming. John was a scientist—a health physicist who loved to educate others about radiation safety. He was a world traveler, a skydiver, a hiker, a reader, and a man who never passed a museum without going in. Now he had Alzheimer’s. His father, his grandmother, and his uncle had all had it.
One day, approaching his sixty-eighth birthday, John told me he was worried. My modest, kind, and loving husband acknowledged what I had already seen for two years. His short-term memory was going. The disease could eventually lead to loss of speech, an inability to eat or walk unaided, a complete oblivion of the man he had been. In time he would not even recognize me.
The day we both faced the inevitable, we gazed at one another with tears in our eyes. He took a deep breath and then told me that when he could no longer follow his intellectual pursuits, when he could no longer drive legally, when he was not yet incontinent or blaming me for his own inabilities, he would take his own life.
[end extract]
Read the whole article at this site:
http://thehumanist.org/september-october-2013/the-end/
