Requests for physician assisted suicide are not motivated simply by pain or fear of pain. Death is horrible not primarily because it is painful, and my fear of death is not primarily fear of pain. It is a spiritual crisis that motivates many requests for physician-assisted suicide. We Americans avoid them, dislike them, dislike even thinking of them partly for that reason. Of course, each brings its own forms of spiritual suffering as well.
Families suffer too.
They face the impending loss of a loved one with the difficulty of imagining how to go on without her. Long unresolved family issues threaten to become permanently unresolvable. Family consensus often proves elusive. And the family too suffers from guilt and from a sense of abandonment. Physicians relate stories about distant family members who suddenly materialize when dad or mom is dying and vehemently insist that everything be done.