My mother is in her mid nineties with dementia. Pretty miserable and very dependent on carers, but otherwise fairly healthy - good heart, healthy appetite but not overweight, mobile enough to do some amount of self-care with a lot of support. Unable to go out alone and increasing preferring to stay in the confines of her small care-provision flat for the moment. May need to spend the last few years of her life later in a full dementia nursing home being fed, wearing incontinence pads and remembering no one. She may well live to 100 but absolutely doesn’t want to do so. My poor mum. I had to fight to ensure she was not on the list for resuscitation should she stop breathing with carers about - something she would have hated as ‘well’ mum. She would have hated the level of care she now needs. Can you imagine bashing her chest, breaking her ribs to make her breathe on machines in ITU with Alzheimer’s at 95?
Life should be about quality. Sadly, other relatives who swore they would quietly end their life with a diagnoses like Alzheimer’s when the loss of memory and independence became too much couldn’t carry out their own wishes - one even a doctor herself - because when you get to that stage you can’t access what you need or manage the process. The stage you are ready generally coincides with the stage you forget what you wanted and are unable anyway to sort it out. Euthanasia is riddled with flaws and could so easily be used exploitatively - but I do think it should be developed as an option for some who can outline their wishes before extreme old age sets in. Or even request withdrawal of care other than liquids and being made comfortable as a more normalised thing. No antibiotics to allow pneumonia to become the ‘Old man’s friend’ again. Staff are too frightened of being sued to do this unless it is very explicitly laid out - understandably.
Agreed levels of euthanasia- and by agreed, I mean agreed legally before a person becomes ill - feels like it has to arrive at some point. We keep getting better and better at treating conditions which caused the demise of our ancestors like strokes and cancers, heart attacks and dementia, flu and pneumonia - but in the case of very elderly people - at what cost? The poor will increasingly not access care so will die younger knowing it’s because of poverty and the rich/ those in the middle will become older and older, filling the coffers of big care companies, pharmaceutical companies and private hospitals.
If I had one selfish wish, it would be to have a good death after an independent and happy old age, however short that old age was.