We fail to distinguish clearly between the able disabled, such as an employed paraplegic, and the utterly disabled and homebound. We don't think about the difference between the kind of disability that is stable and can be accommodated and the kind that is progressive, requiring constant new adaptations. Even many disabled people fail to make these distinctions. All these mixed feelings are intensified in the face of death. All terminally ill persons are seen as more or less the same though the personal experiences of different terminal illnesses are as varied as the illnesses themselves.
People are vaguely aware that doctors and nurses too often thwart death simply because they can.
Any discussion of death, let alone of a chosen death and euthanasia, therefore takes place in an atmosphere of dread and fear, disgust and anger, approval and admiration, horror and pity. In the worst case, this stew becomes a hysteria that makes rational discussion impossible. I beg the reader to cling to reason as he or she reads this book. I wrote this book above all to vindicate my wife's decision to die and to contribute to a rational discussion of the issues. In the prevailing atmosphere surrounding death, the death by choice of a young woman, however ill she might have been, so disturbs people that they want to distance themselves from it by turning her into an object of pity.