Response To Dudley Clendinen's The Good Short Life

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. However, what about those people who have reached the end of their lives? For them, choosing to commit suicide, or willingly end their lives, is simply accelerating the inevitable. Although suicide has a poor social stigma, it is not always an attempt to “take the easy way out” as many people view it. It can simply be the decision to end life on a high note.
We can simultaneously stimulate the economy and allow the terminally ill and
People spend thousands, hundreds of thousands, and sometimes even millions on treatment and health care throughout their lives. If spent on treatments for curable illnesses, it is completely justifiable. We wish to take every step possible to live longer. However, this is not the case with many terminally ill and near death patients. A terminal illnesses is an illness in which the death of the person diagnosed is inevitable. Treatments do not cure the disease, they simply reduce symptoms and marginally prolong lifespan. In response to Dudley Clendinen’s “The Good Short Life”, David Brooks takes a distant look at end of life practices and medicine in “Death and Budgets”. Brooks demonstrates how an inability to face death is putting us in debt because we are willing “as a nation to spend whatever it takes to push it [death] just slightly over the horizon” (Brooks). In recent decades, we have spent billions on the “War on Cancer” and heart disease, stroke, and Alzheimer’s research to no avail as demonstrated in Figure 1. Therefore, ultimately, a great deal of money spent on health care is spent on patients soon to die (Brooks). In his article, Brooks does not intend to imply that we should cut these terminal patients access to government funded health care, but rather supports the idea that end of life practices can greatly reduce the cost of healthcare. By allowing people near death the right to end their lives, if they
Dudley Clendinen, editorial writer and author, vividly uses his personal experience with Lou Gehrig’s disease in his article “The Good Short Life”: to inform readers of the painful symptoms that accompany the disease and in an attempt to justify his wish to prematurely end his life. He does not view death as end, but, like his battle with alcoholism, simply as another hurdle to overcome (Clendinen). Suffering from a disease that has no significant treatment or cure he states, “If I let this run the whole course, with all the human, medical, technological and loving support I will start to need just months from now, it will leave me, in 5 or 8 or 12 or more years, a conscious but motionless, mute, withered, incontinent mummy of my former self” (Clendinen) (see fig. 1). Rather than living longer through continuously deteriorating health and life quality, as he has witnessed his cousin and Mother suffer through, Clendinen prefers to enjoy “the good short life”. Although a patient near death may wish to end his or her life and the court acknowledges the practice, he or she may not be assured a peaceful passage. In “Deciding to Die, Then Shown the Door” Paula Span discusses the end of Armond and Dorothy Rudolphs’ lives in an attempt to inform the reader on end of life practices. At the age of ninety-two and ninety, respectively, Armond and Dorothy Rudolph both wished to