"A life lived in fear of death is the life, if you can call it that, of the living dead"

A memorable quote in an article worth considering.

At 86 I am aware that my life expectancy is less than that of a younger person. I want to keep learning, be with nature, keep contact with my family, write and generally live while I am still alive.

I cannot for the life of me (pun intended) see what Sellick's Christian mumbojumbo has to do with any of that. I am glad that Sellick recognises that personal immortality once a staple of Christianity is a myth. He may come to the realisation that there is no more encounter with Jesus than there is with Zeus or Apollo. If Jesus actually lived he is now dead as we all will be.

Let us live our lives and face death without the assistance of supernatural mumbojumbo.

The real man or woman learns to live by becoming willing and able to die.
Such a one is able to confront the difficult barriers and frustrations of this world and, yet, remain capable of ecstasy in every moment.

The primary initiation that leads to true human maturity is the confrontation with mortal fear.
Only when the ultimate frustration that is death has been fully considered and felt and understood as a lawful process can the individual live without self-protective and self-destructive fears.
Only in Intuitive freedom from the threat and fear of death is the apparent individual capable of constant love of the Living God, and also capable of transcending the frustrating and self-binding effects of daily experience.
Only in freedom from mortal recoil is the apparent individual capable of ecstasy under all conditions.

Therefore, be fully alive. But first learn right life by dealing with your death in this and every moment.
Become aware that you do not live, but that you are Lived by the Divine God
Become a devotee of the Living God by surrendering your illusion of independent life (which is the egoic self, or body-mind.
Become willing to die in any moment, and maintain no inward armor against it, including the naive childish and even infantile belief in Jesus.
Die in every moment, by not holding on to your life.

Only this ecstatic forgetting of self and Remembering of the Living God is the true way of life.
All other efforts are leading to death.
Life is only a desperate agitation, if you not forget your apparent separate self in Communion with the Living God
Human beings are all dying in this mood of separation.
Therefore, remember the One in Whom you are arising, until you are only Joy.
This is how to live, and this is also the secret of how to pass through death.
Death is the forgetting of self in the Living God.
Those who are only ego-possessed destroy themselves, by degrees, until death.
But those who constantly forget themselves in Communion with the Living God live in constant uncaused Joy.

The reality is that we all face a tragic ending, its just a question
when and how.

Working with nature as part of my profession, has given me an
acceptance of live and death as part of it all.

Its suffering that I have a problem with. For some its a quick
heart attack, or they die in their sleep. Not are all so fortunate.

I've followed a few cases, where people in palliative care, some
can't move at all, have been forced to endure ongoing suffering,
when their qaulity of life has gone and they'd simply like a choice
about their ending. Exit Switzerland has a wonderful set of
paramaters by which they can legally operate in Switzerland, to give
people with terminal diseases, such a choice.

In Australia the Catholic political lobby ensures that no such laws
can be introduced, cleverly playing politician against politician.

Sellick is an Anglican and seems more accepting of death. So my
question to him is, should people be forced to suffer against their
will, or should we give them a choice? What is the Anglican viewpoint on all this?

A great letter "Yabby" I agree with you 100%

Yabby,
The Anglican Church does not have a magisterium like the Church of Rome and hence does not have a party line on moral issues. My experience in hospice chaplaincy has been that pain during dying is almost always controlled even if that means that the doctors have to tread the fine line between a morphine dose that will eliminate pain and a dose that would inhibit respiration and hence kill. There is the danger that while attempting to eliminate suffering we eliminate the sufferer. Also the legal implications of assisted suicide are tortuous and it places a burden on the medical profession when there is an expectation that they can give a fatal dose. Frankly, I don't think its worth the candle.
Peter Sellick