The following Mark's Daily Apple article was written by Marksissons and is narrated by Brock Armstrong.

How We Die, End of Life Planning.

Last week's post on the Fear of Death got quite a discussion going, and I appreciated the

perspectives that folks shared on the subject. One interesting issue that people raised

involved the circumstance of dying itself, specifically dying within a traditional

medical setting where interventions and technology to prolong life abound.

It reminds me of that old Woody Allen quote. I'm not afraid of death. I just don't want to be there

when it happens. As a whole, we do indeed die differently these days than compared to our ancestors,

certainly Grok and his clan, but perhaps even our grandparents and great-grandparents. Science, to its credit,

has developed ways to save and even restore quality of life in situations that would have

been our inevitable demise even a few decades ago. But it's a different focus than efforts that simply

prolong life in a technical sense. That leads me to today's question. In a decidedly unprimal

medical world, what role can self-determination play in a desirable death as it does in a vibrant

life? Years ago, I read a book by German author Ruffer. in a desirable death as it does in a vibrant life.

Years ago I read a book by German author Rainer Maria Rilke that talked about the good death.

Far from a romantic description, the narrator recounted in tremendous detail her grandfather's dying,

which had been larger than life itself, a force of nature that

extended its own astonishing power to all who witnessed it. Those of us who have been with the dying,

human or animal, have seen firsthand the magnitude of the experience. I'm thinking here particularly

of those situations in which people choose to die

and or are given the opportunity to die, without the surroundings of medical devices, without the

barrage of technology, and extreme medicating you find in most hospitals and sometimes in home

...