Dudley Cledenin, former national correspondent for the NY Times, writes about his impending death due to ALS (Lou Gehrig’s Disease) and his desire to die well.

In the Guardian, Sabine Durrant writes about Nell Dunn’s play Home Death, which was written after the death of Dunn’s partner Dan Oestreicher, who wanted to die in dignity at home. However:

Oestreicher was visited by five national health professionals – four district nurses, one doctor – in his last 24 hours, but none of them seemed trained to deal with a home death. When Nell woke in the early hours, she realised Dan was dying. His lungs were bubbling; he was panicking – he felt he was drowning – and in pain. She couldn’t ring for an ambulance because they would take him to hospital and he didn’t want that. She had four phone numbers, including one for a hospice, but when she rang she was told to ring back after 8.30am; when she called again it went straight to answerphone. Her doctor’s surgery was closed. There was no morphine. A district nurse came, gabbled into her mobile phone inches away from Dan’s ear, a doctor, another nurse. No one knew where to find an open chemist. “I know it was a Sunday, but people die on a Sunday for God’s sake.” There was irritation from the doctor who visited, tactlessness: “I’m being paid well for this.” Finally, late morning, everyone dispersed and Nell and Dan were left alone. She lay next to him on their bed. He came in and out of consciousness and at 1.30pm, their dog Primrose beside him, he died.

The nurse returned with the morphine at 4pm. She had been gone for five hours. Was she embarrassed? “I don’t know. I didn’t let her in.”

Dying well–the notion reminds me of the ars moriendi  of the medieval period, a genre of devotional literature that encouraged Christians to prepare for death, making a proper final confession, so they could be certain of a successful passage into purgatory. But there’s something else here, too–the desire to have control over how one ends one’s life. That’s certainly the case in Clendenin’s piece. It also seems to be some of the motive behind the assisted suicide movement. Those who are opposed to such things often criticize people like Clendenin for aspiring to self-sufficiency. He points out how he ministered at the end of life to his mother and other relatives, and that he wishes to spare his beloved daughter that experience. But has he asked her?

I don’t have answers to the questions raised by these essays, to the question of assisted suicide, or even to the question of human dignity, whether it be in the sickbed or at end of life. Posing the questions is hard enough.