Dementia Patients

So John Simpson has come up with the novel idea that it were better to die by suicide before one is reduced to a husk with a pumping heart, quivering limbs, senseless eyes and the constant flow of various involuntary bodily emissions and effluxions stemmed by pads and cloths, at the hands of care home staff.

The trouble with the Simpson option is that old people are often suddenly overtaken by events and a massive stroke can rob one of the ability to think and or to act to 'end it all', yet leave one lingering for years in some twilight zone. It would, I suspect, be impossible to make an exactly-timed appointment with death, to avoid a decline into senility, after maximizing one's time of enjoyment.

It's a far better and safer idea to smoke like an engine and drink like a fish and go out with a massive coronary at around 70, while out in the fresh air, undertaking some pleasurable pursuit. The trouble is that secular, modern society nearly everywhere is all geared up to convincing people that they can live forever if they don't smoke, don't drink too much etc etc. But it's all a big 'con' because the big downside is that there is an increasing community of helpless, joyless old people, sliding around in incontinence pads, in forgotten corners of care homes: drawing pensions for years after the forecast funding has been exhausted, and spending vast sums of their own or the state's cash on the care needed, and they have been completely robbed of the mental and\or physical ability to end it all. Of course, the care home owners have a nice little industry going and growing, to the detriment of true human happiness.