Planning the Perfect Ending by Martin Goldsworthy

Author:Martin Goldsworthy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: life and death, personal responsibility, assisted dying, choice in dying, death by choice, end of life planning, dying peacefully
Publisher: Martin Goldsworthy

5 Defining your solutions

The solutions you define while you are still well need to cover a range of possibilities for your end-of-life state. There may be some indication of the more likely conditions; based on how your close relatives died, and on your current health. Your chosen lifestyle may also influence how you will end up. So consider now at least the extreme possibilities (brain bad – body good, and brain good - body bad), but expect that reality will be somewhere in between.

In general, as time goes on, it will become clearer how you will end up; unless there has been an accident. As it becomes clearer you may want to see if your plan should be updated. It is anyway necessary to take account of any significant changes in such key factors as medical science and legislation.

You need to remember that the current progress being made with preservation of the life of our body is nowhere near to being matched for our mind. We still know very little about the brain and how to keep it healthy, and even less about the mind.

There are many recommendations which reflect what we know about staying physically healthy. We know, with a reasonable scientific basis, that for the average person; smoking, drinking heavily, being overweight and not exercising are “bad”. If we are that way inclined, we may try to be “good” and we will probably live a little longer and perhaps age a bit more slowly. If things do not go well, or we are unlucky, there are also all sorts of medical investigations and interventions available to help our body survive a bit longer.

For the mind there is still nothing equivalent. We do not know how to delay or prevent dementia. The only health recommendations related to brain function are along the lines of use it or lose it, which is probably good advice, but nobody really knows. A recent small-scale, short-term experiment on how we might improve brain function compared the following activities; getter physically fitter, doing mental puzzles (sudoki) and learning something new. They measured the effect of each of these on the ability to remember. All helped a bit, but attending a class to learn how to draw was clearly the best. Whether such activities help with preventing or delaying dementia is still unknown.

There is an obvious alternative to the preservation path. Will adopting a life-style contrary to the current “healthy” recommendations ensure that you arrive at “body bad”? For an individual the answer is probably no, even if, on average, the answer may be yes. A risk to be borne in mind is that resulting ill-health will make the last part of your life more unpleasant.

Finally, before you decide anything, look around for up-to-date information. Just recently I discovered by chance that the NHS web-site has good sections on 'End of Life Care' (6), and on Dementia (7). There is also an organization called Independent Age (8) which maintains a web-site with many useful types of information, and other links.

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