...One of the most beautifully compassionate articles I have read on this site.

A very moving piece Brian. It sounds like you are writing from deep reflection. We all have something to learn from your thoughts as we face death.

A very poignant article that touches on similar experience in my own life (a wife with terminal cancer) as well as matters of interest.
I've long been fascinated with the thought that before institutionalised healthcare and the nanny state in general, old age and infirmity would commonly have been handled by the family---a suffocating pillow at night being perhaps a favoured resort. I suspect it was once so common for both doctors and family members to terminate painful, intolerable, useless and unaffordable lives that the practice was largely responsible for statistically much lower life-expectancy.
But now age-care is a lucrative business and the whole object, it seems to me, is to keep the decrepit alive so the money can be all eaten-up. I vow and declare I won't have all that money wasted on keeping my wasted body and mind in a vegetative state. So long as our present system prevails I'd rather my kids put it to good use, or it went towards alleviating poverty etc. I think it's a scandal how much we spend on surgery procedures for broken down old wrecks while millions die for want of clean water.
As for the issue of actual care, I suspect old age care is similar to day care, in that the staff commonly tell parents a pack of lies about the day's activities and how their little darlings are coming along; "just tell em what they want to hear" seems to be the tacit policy. And what can we expect when our carers are mercenaries, and poorly paid ones at that!
I think family members know full well that their aged family members are not better off, they're just disposed of--though their consciences are appeased by the knowledge that along with the abnegation of responsibility goes the accumulated funds they ought to have a title to.
Age care's an industry. Infrastructure and five star hotels spring up wherever the money is.
If I'm ever old and senile a compassionate family member ought to be able to end my life with a pillow, and hopefully a tear in the eye.

I want to add that I don't mean carers "are" mercenary, but that any sense of vocation these days is quaint at best and must compete with other personal pressures associated with advancement and more conspicuous indicators of success. It's an outrage what our carers are paid, compared with those in the "professions", who are or become the true mercenaries and know nothing or little of vocation.
Many of our carers are dedicated, but the system does not encourage altruism--quite the opposite.
I agree with what I take to be the article's central polemic; families should take far more "practical" responsibility for their redundant family members.

In any event carers do it for the money, such as it is, which explains the extraordinary turnover of staff and points up that fact that "carer", like "cleaner", is a designation for society's failures.

The same may be said of the military, another mercenary institution. Indeed the military was always proudly macho and mercenary until 100 years ago or so. It's been so important during this period to indoctrinate bullet-stoppers with nationalistic and religious fervour so as to camouflage the fact that it's really a disgusting business. Though these days careerism seems to have made even the military respectable.

A good piece, Brian.
I agree totally that we should be allowed to have the means to take control over our own death. The present system is cruel and inhumane, as well as irrational.

Brian,

What a moving and wise article. It's clear that you have derived extra meaning in your life from the experience of nurturing another life as it slipped away. It's something we in the modern West have managed to obliterate from our experience...perhaps a first in history, as most of the people over the eons have accepted your experience as usual.

I remember looking on incredulously at fourteen as my grandmother transformed from an attractive outgoing woman into a tiny hunched wizened, moaning, white-haired shadow of her former self in the space of a few months after being transferred to a nursing home. She'd broken her hip and had struggled on with the lack of mobility, until her daughter (with whom she lived) moved to a high-rise. At once she was isolated. only able to look down at the ants of people moving about in their daily meanderings far below her. My auntie worked and Grandma spent her days alone - eventually she was moved to the nursing home, where, as I mentioned, her demise followed rapidly.

Squeers,

You are right to equate elderly care with the daycare of infants. Add to that the segregation of all children in school during their formative years - and you realise that in industrial society if your are not directly participating in the "workplace" then the consumer model packs you away behind institutional walls for the productive hours (and beyond in the case of the aged).

It is possibly a fact that the uncomfortableness of thoughts of one’s own death in a collective sense has made change into a more compassionate law very difficult to bring about. There appears to be a tendency by many to employ the ‘us and them’ approach to those whose lottery in having achieved life also includes the very better odds of it ending in terrible circumstances. Reality shows there is no ‘them’.

Consequently, the, “It won’t happen to me”, syndrome has created hesitancy about what many consider to be the most important and final decision one can make. This has aided societies being inactive instead of being proactive in demanding of our leaders that the majority request for a system of legal voluntary euthanasia be initiated.

It is also my observation through sad personal experience and others I know of that many folk are willing to allow the ‘authorities’ to take control of their lives and deaths. There is a tendency in some to believe the ‘authorities’ know best and will handle end-of-life in an adequate manner. I have found this way of thinking can result in producing dreadful circumstances for those with such trust.

Brian Holden’s story had the element that “I want to die” in it before the onslaught of dementia really took hold. It is not the case that if legal, everyone with that thought, would enact a premature death but everyone should have the opportunity to do so.

I personally do not wish to hang grimly onto a vegetative life nor do I wish for those I love to be burdened by my incurable problems. Others see a gain in allowing life, no matter the quality, to continue to a ‘natural’ end. That should be their choice.

Politicians disallowing both ways are disregarding democratic-process.

David

I think the ironic title of Brian Holden's article also deserves some attention.
By "taking time out", I take the author to mean, from the treadmill, the unrelenting pursuit of wealth/status/consumerism/lifestyle, the irony being that the "wealth" he alludes to is deeply experiential rather than shallow and diversionary. It reminds me of a great book by Erich Fromm: "To Have or to Be".
I look back on my own time in that position and I'm afraid I squandered it. I remember pulling my wife into a standing position out of a chair, or off the bed, or the toilet, oh so gently, her arms around my neck, my knees bent and slowly straightening, pulling her up, because the cancer had progressed to the bowel and she was in terrible abdominal pain. I remember calling an ambulance at midnight when neither of us could endure the agony any longer--while the children slept. I remember the tacit reproach from the ambulance drivers, who seemed to think I was negligent in not calling them sooner. They didn't know she'd only been home from hospital for two days; she was let out on Mother's Day, in a pathetic state but, again, the "tacit" understanding being it was her last chance to spend time at home with her family.
And indeed she went straight to palliative care, where she lived for another four or five days.
I never had the same attitude Brian writes about. I still had a taste for life and saw it as my ordeal as much as hers, so I missed out on the "wealth" he alludes to.
In palliative care she was kept high on morphine and everything else was withheld, including water, untill her organs gradually shut-down. I asked a male nurse how this was "not" euthenasia--albeit tortuous.
He declined to comment, but we had a tacit understanding.