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Comment by Johnny555 | Hacker News Reader

I remember visiting my grandmother with my new girlfriend when grandma was bedridden and nearly blind. She wasn't always lucid, but she was this time -- we had a nice talk about things in the past, she got to meet my girlfriend (who is now my wife), but during a lull in the conversation, she said "Johnny, I don't know why I'm still here, I just want to leave but my body won't let me".

That led to a long conversation of mortality with my gf and both of us promised that we'd help each other out if we got into that state and were ready to leave. I hope by then it's legal.

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My grandmother was fairly irate that she recovered from pneumonia and grandfather did not. She kept asking when she was going to die and was very straightforward about the entire ordeal. She said something along the lines of 'all my friends are dead and I've lived long enough.'

I wonder how your family took this? I had a similar experience with an elderly person on my wife's side of the family. At that time of our lives, I couldn't understand how someone could refuse medical treatment and seem to yearn for death. Now that I'm a decade older, I see that her actions were not without reasonable cause...one might even say they were courageous and bold. She was simply done. She'd lost a child earlier in her life. She loved her family but everyone was well off and content. She didn't like doctors and hospitals. She was in near constant pain from arthritis. And she was just...done.

It was a mixed bag as far as reactions. Some family is religious, some incapable of expressing emotion, some work in healthcare and have seen death enough to accept it. Living in pain with no personal hope is a big gap. Having others force their idea on you about what you should accept as 'things to live for' seems more depressing than anything to me. It's always harder on the living because we are selfish in wanting a person to stick around who does not want to.

Having recently had a grandparent with advanced Parkinson's pass in a relatively peaceful and dignified manner after contracting pneumonia (compared to the living hell of their primary ailment), I've personally seen the truth in that colloquial name for it - the "old man's friend". Definitely one of the better ways to make an exit, especially when one is past the point of being able to articulate a will to die.

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