Say you’re in your late seventies, maybe eighty. You can still move around unassisted and you generally recognize the world and people around you; you remember where you put your socks and you know how to put them on. You pee in the bathroom and not in your pants. You go to bed as normal on a Thursday, and on Friday, you don’t wake up. Your heart just stops, there was no pain, no drama. As far as death and dying go, you just hit lotto, I mean, you’re dead, but you got lucky. Your body left but your dignity remained. No one gets that lucky in real life and the end for most of us, if our parents are an accurate indicator, will be a humiliating, debasing, bank-account-draining disaster that will terrorize our children and make a mockery of the life we aspired to make meaningful.

I wish it were not so. I wish I was braver, I wish society was braver. I wish medical care didn’t lead to bankruptcy. I wish me and my friends and my family had a death coach.

A lady had ALS. Before it got really hairy, she made plans. While she could still function, while she could still move and talk and think, she had a party and invited everyone important to her. They drank and laughed and reminisced and when each guest left she gave them one or several of her belongings and then she said goodbye – not the see you later kind, but the I love you and this time tomorrow I’ll be dead kind. After all the guests had departed she called her doctor. The next morning the two of them traveled to a predetermined spot, a wonderful meadow with rolling hills and tall grass. An Adirondack chair sat alone beneath the shade of a sycamore. She sat in it. Looked straight ahead. The doctor administered an injection, then a second. Her eyes gently closed and the rustling wind brushed her cheek. Her heart stopped and her soul flew. She had an exit strategy. Executed it perfectly. She played God, on herself. She was her own master. It took guts. Was she a brave badass or a sinner? You can answer that question for yourself, but she did what worked for her. She seized the control while she still had it. Control is not likely for the rest of us, and as such, as a society, we’re failing.

“If I ever get like that, if that ever happens to me, just shoot me.” I think I’ve seen people say stuff like that in the movies and I’m pretty sure I’ve heard adults in real life say it too. The inference is that when the physical body breaks down to a serious degree, when failing health crosses a certain invisible threshold, someone should end it, that it would be better for everyone. That’s a heavy trip. Probably not very practical. If such talk was taken seriously, we’d have an onslaught of people descending on the world’s hospitals and care facilities, pillows in hand, walking toward a loved with (I suppose) merciful intent. Asking friends and family to commit murder isn’t the answer. The answer lies in somehow empowering the dying.

Medical science won’t save us. No one in a position of authority, no one with intellectual knowledge of such things, will give us timely, fact-based, definitive counsel: Okay Patrick, it’s all downhill from here, your quality of life, your grip on reality, your mastery of thought and body parts will be slipping from this point forward … I’m putting a pill on your nightstand, you don’t have to take it today, you don’t have to take it at all, but…

It would be silly to go through life as a passive observer. Same thing with death methinks. I don’t suggest dwelling on exit strategies but I’m on the lookout for better ones.