I identify with this. As a lawyer, I spent years justifying the government's anti-death position, arguing (mostly with myself) that as a policy matter, letting people commit suicide by medical means would introduce all kinds of mischief into estate and family planning.

However, having seen both my father-in-law and my dad die from cancer, my mind is completely changed. I'm sure there are worse deaths than late stage renal failure, but my FIL was begging the doctors to kill him by the end, it was totally macabre. My dad's death in hospice care was better, but it still took almost two weeks before he took his last breath. Both deaths were traumatic for everyone around them except the doctors and nurses who see it every day.

What aggravates me is that people like me simply do not see death every day. We see it maybe once or twice close up in our entire lifetimes. So why are people like me being asked to advocate for this? MDs in hospitals see this every. single. day. Doctors and nurses should be advocating for some form of assisted suicide for terminal patients because dying is a million times more painful than whatever possible self/assisted-inflicted death moment could ever be.

If I treated my dog like the doctors treated my relatives, I think I'd be charged with cruelty to animals - and perhaps rightly so. Nobody would let a horse or a dog die an agonizing death from cancer; they would feel duty-bound to put the animal out of its misery. Yet with humans we all want to pass the buck: the family doesn't want to do it, the doctors don't want to do it, and the dying person desperately wants to do it but cannot.

I don't think there is anything morally wrong with committing suicide if you get a terminal cancer diagnosis. I'm sorry, but my own plan is to go off in the woods with a shotgun and a single shell and eat it somewhere where it won't leave a big mess. Maybe send a note to the local PD by snail mail so they can find the body before anyone else does. That strikes me as a completely reasonable, even considerate thing to do.