I have not often seen much dignity in the process by which we die.

Death is the surcease that comes when the exhausting battle has been lost.

Where the despair of loneliness and poverty haunts every hour, the optimism to embark on new projects cannot find a place to alight on the brains cortex. Poverty itself is an enormous obstacle to an enlightened and enlightening - not to say healthy - old age.

I have not often seen much dignity in the process by which we die.

Even putting aside the Judeo-Christian morality upon which the Constitution and our nations culture are based, the notion of forced euthanasia would contradict the long-held body of medical ethics to which all American doctors must adhere.

There is, to be sure, sometimes only a small difference between being alert to possible danger and allowing oneself to become terrified to the point of paralysis by seeming or imagined portents.

A realistic expectation also demands our acceptance that one's allotted time on earth must be limited to an allowance consistent with the continuity of our species... We die so that the world may continue to live. We have been given the miracle of life because trillions and trillions of living things have prepared the way for us and then have died-in a sense, for us. We die, in turn, so that others may live. The tragedy of a single individual becomes, in the balance of natural things, the triumph of ongoing life.