On a brisk day at a restaurant outside Chicago, Deb Robertson sat with her teenage grandson to talk about her death.
She’ll probably miss his high school graduation. She declined the extended warranty on her car. Sometimes she wonders who will be at her funeral.
Those things don’t frighten her much. The 65-year-old didn’t cry when she learned two months ago that the cancerous tumors in her liver were spreading, portending a tormented death.
But later, she received a call. A bill moving through the Illinois Legislature to allow certain terminally ill patients to end their own lives with a doctor’s help had made progress.
Then she cried.
“Medical-aid in dying is not me choosing to die,” she says she told her 17-year-old grandson. “I am going to die. But it is my way of having a little bit more control over what it looks like in the end.”
That same conversation is happening beside hospital beds and around dinner tables across the country, as Americans who are nearing life’s end negotiate the terms with themselves, their families and, now, state lawmakers.
If anything, you’d think Atheists would value life more considering under that paradigm life is a finite resource that can and will run out.
Good old scarcity.
I’m an atheist and I certainly value life more. I don’t believe in an afterlife, so that’s all you get.
But I also think that death can be very dignified. What can be very undignified is dying, especially if it is in a very agonizing way.
And that is why I support legal euthanasia. Forcing people to suffer something unbearable that is impossible to escape as long as they are alive is cruel.
Yeah almost like an afterlife is a made up idea to convince people to be chill with dying in war
That being said, there are experiences no one really needs to go through. There’s no point to feeling the agonizing pain of end stage cancers. There’s no point to feeling calcium deposits or liver failure. If someone wants to skip those things and cut off a few months of suffering, I don’t blame them.