The "Right to die" fairy tales

It's a long depressing post, but essentially says that in the "good old days" people just quietly slipped away and died...

Having lived much of my life in the third world, I know it is not true...

But what few realize is that CHRONICALLY ILL people have a miserable life...people with arthritis or TB of the spine or bad backs who essentially stay in bed for years...the old lady who "fell and never got up" so she has laid on her mat for five years due to an undiagnosed hip fracture...the young boy with cancer who went home to die and lived miserably in terrible pain...the people with dropsy (Congestive heart failure or renal insufficiency) whose legs swelled up and got infected...

Read "the Death of Ivan Ilyovitch" by Tolstoi for how people died in the "good old days"...

The moral to Tolstoi's story was that the REAL compassionate person was the peasant nurse, not his relatives who avoided his suffering at all cost...