Assisted Suicide

Your May 26 editorial, “First, Life With Dignity,” has an odd omission. It states that most of the 15 Oregon individuals using physician aid in dying “were looking for relief from depression.” But it fails to state that all of them were diagnosed as in the advanced stage of terminal illness, nearly all of them with cancer--which makes their depression quite rational, not clinical.

I spent more than a month of the past year in the hospital, recovering from operations with quite positive prognoses. My care was quite good (nurses are wonderful people). But I definitely don’t want to spend the last weeks of my life that way, hobbled with an intravenous line, etc.--no way! I’d much rather have control of my situation, to depart this world by reliable means in my home at a time of my own choosing, rather than prolonging the show to end zonked out on opiates in some hospital bed.

WILLIAM M. KAULA

Brentwood

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Christina Puchalski’s “We Don’t Give the Dying What They Need” (Commentary, May 26) is a well-argued reminder that “death with dignity” should not be used as an excuse to shorten life with dignity.

Prior to reading her column I was reading through Simon Wiesenthal’s “Justice, Not Vengeance,” which makes several poignant observations about the Nazi euthanasia program. He says, “When, nowadays, I again hear physicians discussing euthanasia, and when they call it ‘mercy killing,’ horror grips me: an academic degree is unfortunately no guarantee against psychopathic or sadistic behaviour. . . . It was first of all the ‘incurably sick,’ next the mentally disturbed, the mentally retarded and the very old. Soon anybody with any kind of disability was ‘not worthy of life.’ ”

ART BLASER

Orange