>Am not so sure. If you are in your nineties, classified as multi-morbid, cannot live, not even walk alone any more and have realized that your mind slipped to a level of perhaps 15-25% of your prime (not enough to warrant stewardship, coming from the far right side of the bell curve) and have nothing to look forward to but more misery and pain ? Hoping for a quick natural death, fearing a stroke which does not complete the job ? Believing in getting access to a fountain of youth Have such a case in family, talked over the options, which in itself is unpleasant to the extreme - but have decided for myself: if that person asks me to drive to a country where assisted death is not a crime, to wait for 3 days, argue *once, but with determination against,* to be certain it is no spur of the moment idea and then - more than unwilling - do as asked to do. I my world view it is each persons prerogative to decide to go on living or not - and the idea of such a trip (which I would have to accompany, even if just to make sure any last minute mind changes are followed and action is stopped) is scary to me.
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>You have a good point. But if your mental capacity is so diminished, how would you know whether or not your life is worth living?

The wish to die soon without more physical and mental trouble was voiced when unclear parts were less then 10 minutes per day and capacity was back then good enough to read a paper or discuss familiar topics.

>Unless, of course, you have Alzheimer's. Andy's father had Alzheimer's and in his few moments of clarity, he told Andy that it was like being in hell. Andy's mother died recently at the age of 96 and even though she had no clue what was going on around her because of dementia, she seemed cheerful enough.

Not clinical Alzheimer, but creeping old age dementia discernable via xray - short term memory transfer capacity at lower bound and so on - when in active life each month a couple of hundred pages of numbers were calculated mostly without paper, sometimes verifying with a calculator (no PC back then).

>In her last few years, she had a dog's life - living in the moment and not remembering anything that didn't occur within the last 2 minutes (unless they were memories from her childhood which she remembered vividly). It was more painful to the people who had known her as a bright, active and capable woman than it was to her.

If you factor in trouble with spine, oestrogen controlled prostate cancer sapping residues of testosterone backed willpower and some of the control kids learn before school as well as trouble with 3rd set of teeth making even eating unenjoyable every third month on top of the realization that most of the time memory won't come up again... Or to say it with the stones: what a drag it is getting old - overdosed 8 years ago with nonprescription and prescription pain killers - not as a suicide attempt, but just to relieve some of the physical pain nagging from nearly everywhere.