Do We Have The Right To Die If We're Terminally Ill? - Diane Rehm

Diane Rehm's book began as a film. She narrates and interviews in the documentary, and about a year into shooting decided to write; the book represents roughly twenty-five of the fifty interviews she conducted around the country. She then traces the subject to her own family record, and the sequence matters: her mother died at 49 when Rehm was 19, and nobody listened while she suffered; her father died eleven months later, which Rehm describes as a broken heart.

Two further deaths are described as decisions rather than illnesses. Her father-in-law, a former journalist living alone on a Pennsylvania farm, developed diabetic retinopathy and could no longer see, and took his own life. Her mother-in-law, at 92, had severe back pain and headaches for which nothing could be done that she was willing to accept, and did the same. Rehm draws the conclusion explicitly: the idea of deciding when one's own life should end has been in her mind for a very long time.

Her illustration of the taboo is a church hall in upstate New York with about 350 people in it: she opened by asking "how many of you are planning not to die?" and got what she calls a nervous titter. Her claim is that death is "the last taboo" and that adults have to move past pretending, from being willing to talk about it to planning for it.

The plan she describes is concrete and domestic: not a hospital bed with tubes and oxygen and no sight or hearing, but "my own bed", her own home, her husband, children and grandchildren, and the chance to say goodbye. Whether that is available, she argues, is largely a question of law, and the answer depends on where the dying person lives.