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Having experienced the loss of my father at age 25, just under a year ago, my opinions of 'end of life rights' have become strengthened and overwhelmingly strong. One of the conversations that seemed to come up quite often with my dad, toward the end, was how humanely we treat our pets in terms of terminal illness as opposed to how we treat our human family members. We'll put an animal 'out of their misery' through a simple and painless process but doing the same for humans is legally prohibited. Even assisting a human to euthanize themselves - no matter the legal action taken to protect that 'assistant' - is likely to land that empathetic soul in prison. When my dad's pain was uncontrollable and his will to live had nearly disappeared he wished outloud for there to be something that could be done - for some way to just end it, "even though he'd sure miss his girls." It's at that point in a person's life that I firmly believe they should be given the choice and the right to die. No want or wish of my own mattered at that point.

A person's life is a very individual and private thing, with no other person truly understanding what it is to be anyone other than themselves. As much as it may hurt to see your loved one letting go, or "giving up," or even deciding to remain on life support when you believe they shouldn't be, it is physically and emotionally impossible to be in their shoes (or hospital slippers, as the case may be). The right to die is something that should never be taken away - or, on the other hand, forced upon someone. I know deep within that if my sister and I had begged my dad to reconsider his advance directive (where he expressly stated that he wanted NO extraordinary measures taken to prolong his life), he would have - but that doesn't mean that it would have been the right thing to do. Nor would it have been right for my sister and I to have used my power of attorney to decide to put him on a ventilator when we KNEW it wasn't what we wanted. Yes, it would have prolonged our time with him, but ultimately his lungs would have still failed and the end result would have been the same. Those extra hours or days wouldn't have made losing him any easier and it would have gone against something that I knew he had made very clear to us all. His right to die in line with his own wishes should not have been compromised simply for the benefit of those he was leaving behind. As much as the decision to stop all IV fluids (except pain medication) was excruciatingly painful for my sister and I... we were able to honor my father in one final way by giving him what we knew he'd have wanted.

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