It's up to you

Terry Pratchett used to be my favorite author. I have read almost all his books (and there are many); he's responsible for fleshing out (pun intended) some of my favorite characters of all time.

He was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's disease. He has also begun to campaign for the rights of those diagnosed with fatal diseases to die on their own terms. He proposes 'assisted death tribunals', which is a court of arbitration that will decide whether or not you should be allowed to make this kind of decision.

Regardless of how you feel about a person's right to die, Pratchett raises an interesting point. Specifically: very often someone that wants to die is accused of being insane or irrational, and the people providing the 'care' are held up as rational and sane. "He's not in his right mind," they'll say. "He doesn't know what he wants, that's just the dementia talking." Is it really?

This was covered very interestingly in the book The Corrections by J. Franzen. One of the main characters suffers from Parkinson's disease, and as his life falls to pieces he becomes increasingly desperate to bring it to an end. The other characters treat this as a symptom of his dementia, but it's actually a symptom of clarity. Imagine his distress when his 'caregivers' treat his few truly lucid thoughts as insanity.

Why shouldn't you have a right to make a choice about your life? It's yours, after all. If you can take the whole of your relationships into account and you determine that you would rather not deteriorate slowly into dementia then you should be able to manage it however you want.