Do We Have The Right To Die If We're Terminally Ill? - Diane Rehm | Modern Wisdom Podcast 288

It is the last taboo. It is the one thing nobody relishes talking about. (airplane whoosh)

Why did you write a book about people's right to die?

Understand, please, that first came the documentary, and then we were a year into the documentary, which I both narrate and I am the interviewer, when I decided to write the book based on the documentary. So, just to be clear, the documentary came first. The book is representing 25 or so of the 50 interviews that I did during the film process around the country. And I think, Chris, it goes way back. Um, my mother died at 49. I was 19. She had liver cancer. She was in terrible pain and begged to die, and nobody listened, and she suffered. My father died 11 months later of a broken heart. When my husband of 54 years, my late husband, John Rehm, and I were married, his father and mother were both alive, and then at age 72, his father, who was living alone on a farm in Pennsylvania after having had a career in journalism, had diabetic retinopathy. He could no longer see, and he took his own life. And then, at age 92, my mother-in-law, who had terrible back pains, terrible headaches about which nothing could be done that she was willing to do, for example, surgery, she took her own life. So, the idea of making a decision about your own life and when it should end has really been in my mind for a very long time.

This is a very uncomfortable topic for most people to discuss, isn't it?

Most people would rather not talk about death. I can remember speaking at a church in Upstate New York, and there were about 350 people in the congregation, and I started out by saying, "How many of you are planning not to die?" And of course, there was this little titter within the congregation, a nervous titter. People really don't wanna talk about death. It is the last taboo. They would rather pretend it's never going to happen, as children do, but we, as adults, must reach a point where we are not only willing to talk about it, we need to plan for it so that we, if we choose not to, don't end up in a hospital attached to all kinds of tubes and oxygen and seeing/hearing nothing, just dying. Who wants to do that? Not I. I want to be in my own bed. I want to be in my own home with my husband, my children, my grandchildren with me, and I want to be able to say goodbye and tell them how much I love them, so I am planning ahead. And truly, Chris, the purpose of both the documentary and the book are to get people to talk about what it is they want at the end of life.

What is stopping people from having that kind of a death at home with the family around them? Why aren't people having that kind of a death at the moment?