The Last Day of Her Life Link

A wonderful heartbreaking essay By Robin Marantz Henig:

When Sandy went back to the waiting room to meet Daryl, she was weeping uncontrollably. Between sobs, she explained the diagnosis and the inevitable decline on the horizon. She felt terror at the prospect of becoming a hollowed-­out person with no memory, mind or sense of identity, as well as fury that she was powerless to do anything but endure it. With Alzheimer’s disease, she would write, it is “extraordinarily difficult for one’s body to die in tandem with the death of one’s self.” That day at Mapstone’s office, she vowed that she would figure out a way to take her own life before the disease took it from her.

The essay is about so much more than dealing with a diagnosis. It’s about humanity and empathy for our future self as well as others.