In an attentive, packed room in Forbes Library the other night, longtime Gazette writer and editor Laurie Loisel read from her recent book “On their Own Terms,” which expands on the stories about the end-of-life decisions she published in the Gazette in 2014.
Then Dr. Jeffrey Zesiger, the former director of Hospice and Palliative Care at Cooley Dickinson Hospital, spoke.
Both Loisel and Zesiger stressed the importance of choice at the difficult time when we’re nearing the end of our lives. This is personal for me. I’m at an age when I can’t expect to live many more years.
I’ve seen older people die and read about others. Too many of us have no choice at all. Many are, to put it bluntly, tortured to death by medical measures that artificially prolong life when there is no hope of leading a normal life again — even a reduced normal life.
If you want to have some choice when you’re close to death — and all of us, no matter how young we are, will eventually be close to death — please support the End of Life Options Act, a bill now before the Massachusetts Legislature. Over 60 physicians in our state have expressed strong support for it.
Please contact the Co-Chairs of the Joint Committee on Public Health: Rep. John Mahoney at John.Mahoney@mahouse.gov, and Sen. Jo Comerford at Jo.Comerford@masenate.gov, and urge them to vote to pass H.1926 and S.1208 by the end of July. Let’s make Massachusetts the tenth state to pass such a law.
David BALL
Northampton