Deciding To Die, Then Shown The Door Analysis

Death frightens us. Therefore, acknowledging one’s wish to willingly end his or her life is difficult for the average person to understand. Though we are aware that our days are finite, we live with the false hope that technology may advance by the time we reach the end of our lives to substantially extend them. We live with the delusion of an eternal existence. However, not everyone cringes upon the thought of death. Many elderly people, near death, choose to commit suicide, willingly take one’s own lives, because it is simply accelerating the inevitable. Suicide has a poor social stigma, but it is not always an attempt to “take the easy way out” as many people regard it. It can simply be the decision to end life on a high note. The honorable
When people age and draw closer to death’s door, it is evident that their mental and physical health will deteriorate; and as health continually deteriorates, the consciousness of being a burden increases. Parents who ceaselessly love and care for their children are, often, reluctant to burden those children with the responsibility of watching over them in the last years of their life as they are aging. In “Deciding to Die, Then Shown the Door” Paula Span explores Armond and Dorothy Rudolphs’ decision to end their lives. In interviewing their son Neil, it is evident that one of the leading reasons for Mrs. Rudolph’s decision was because she “had nursed her own mother through four years of bone cancer…‘She saw her mother die a slow, wasting death. She felt pinned down for years, and she felt guilty about feeling pinned down’” (Span). Mrs. Rudolph had carried the burden of nursing her dying mother for years and, for that reason, did not want her children to have to writhe under the responsibilities of caring for their dying mother. Similarly, Dudley Clendinen, who suffered from Lou Gehrig’s disease, had “spent hundreds of days at [his] Mother’s side, holding her hand, trying to tell her funny stories. She was being bathed and diapered and dressed and fed, and for the last several years, she looked at [him], her only son, as she might have at a passing cloud”
Regardless, it is commendable that they are able to come to terms with something that scares us so deeply. In “The Good Short Life” Dudley Clendinen states “That is the weird blessing of Lou. There is no escape, and nothing much to do. It’s liberating” (Clendinen). End of life practices are not acknowledged many times because they are an anomalous notion for those who are young and healthy to grasp. For those who are never satisfied with life constantly in search of better experiences, opportunities, and relationships, deciding to willingly relinquish grasp of life is strange. However, for those who have lived a long life or for those suffering from a disease that has no significant treatment or cure there is greater awareness of an imminent promise of death. Since death is promised, and at an accelerated rate for the sick and elderly, it is best to enjoy life to the fullest and welcome it as “one of life’s greatest, most absorbing thrills and challenges” (Clendinen). Instead of enduring continuously deteriorating health and life quality in an attempt to hold on to a few poor months or years of life, many elderly people opt to respectfully bow out, enjoying “the good short