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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I’m a childless fifty year old who has taken care of many elderly relatives in a variety of settings.

I’ve pretty much decided I’d rather die puttering around my apartment and falling than in a nursing home.

What are her finances like ? Could she or you afford home caregivers?[/quote]

This 100%. So many people on DCUM infantilize the elderly and think they can just take away their rights. So what if your mother dies by falling in her house if it's what she wants? I would much rather die living the way I want than being forced into a gross, smelly, depressing nursing home, that my kids will dread coming to whenever they "have" to visit. This is how I feel about my mother. I absolutely loved my mother growing up. She wasn't perfect, but she and my dad gave us a nice life. She is now wasting away in a memory care unit and I literally can't stand her. If she had just lived the way she wanted, in her own home, her life wouldn't be ending this way. So she leaves the stove on and dies in an explosion? Seriously. As long as she doesn't hurt others, then I still say that would be way better than the way she lives now, hated by the one livng relative she has left, through no real fault of her own. I plan to do better for my kids. And would probably follow through on what your mother said, and take the pills. [/quote]

Yes, this exactly.

The Dignitas Clinic is my longterm care plan.  I will do it before I am feeble and starting to decline: I'm thinking 78th birthday, because at that point most of my grandparents and greatgrandparents were experiencing their final independent, enjoyable years.  I will make it a happy occasion, a final trip through European accompanied by whatever friends or family I have left who are supportive.  We will visit all the cities and places where I used to live as an expat, will stay in the best hotels, eat the best food, drink the best wine.  I'll smoke weed whenever and wherever.  I'll carry around a box of fine chocolates and eat them all myself.  Then we'll all head to the clinic in Switzerland, where I will sip that cup of poison and slip away surrounded by happy loved ones.  There will be no decline, no dementia, no last memory of me crying in pain or crazy or pleading to be taken home.  How is this not preferable to the alternative?

I watched three grandparents and two great-grandparents spend their last months or years in nursing homes, and I do not think it was dignified or compassionate.  It was a living hell for each of them.  Two died in terrible pain from cancer in their last days (we don't even allow our dogs or cats to reach that end), one spent years locked in his own body in a Parkinsons hell before finally choking on his own saliva, and the worst was the one had a series of small strokes, but could still walk and was lucid most of the time: he had been quite well-off, had given all of his assets to his kids across his last ten independent years, then plaintively said to me, "I gave away all my money to them.  And they want to put me in that home.  Why won't they make it so I can stay home?"  It was as if a switch had flipped, and everyone universally turned off their emotions and feelings for these people who had been beloved and respected only a few years earlier.  Maybe that's natural, but I don't think it has to be necessary.  There's nothing noble in the end most people will face, so why not plan a dignified exit that will be kinder to me and to my family?

[/quote]

Nice fantasy. Many people think this, but it won’t happen. Your perspective will change and by the time you’re 78 — if you’re lucky enough not to have wasted away slowly of cancer or died suddenly of a stroke — you will feel that living one more day with your children and grandchildren is worth the possible indignity of someone wiping your bottom. Or, dementia will have snuck up on you so slowly that you exist essentially drunk all the time, without the ability to plan that flight to Switzerland.

I see people claim this plan for assisted suicide all the time on this board, but it’s rare to hear of anyone actually doing it. [/quote]

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