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How do you comfort a wife whose mother is little more than an infant ? A mother whose greatest pride was her mind, ( and her greatest fear was its loss) ?

And I’m facing the same issues myself, it seems !

So who “determines dignity” ? For my MIL, it seems it devolves upon her daughters. I can only be supportive. In my case, I’ve already made certain determinations based upon defined presenting conditions.

And you propose what? Killing her as a solution?

At some point we all must ask ourselves how much moral/ethical/legal burden are we willing to place upon our wives/husbands/children in these “end of life” decisions?

Murdering an "inconvenient" person is moral?

It's not a moral burden to care for someone who is ill. It is a moral burden to have the murder of them on your conscience. Does that give dignity to a person, or just reduce them to a commodity that you dispose of when it's no longer useful?

I faced these issues with my husband all last summer. He died in August. “Quality of life” was brought up to me by the doctor and by my ste-son. To me, their solutions were based on THEIR quality of life instead of my husband’s. They would rid of the dealing with the problem and wouldn’t have to face it anymore if my husband was gone.

Since my husband and I had discussed his declining poor health a number of times, I knew exactly what to do, which was do everything possible to keep him alive (and screw their quality of life).

Although spouses can make decisions, I also had a medical power of attorney to stop anyone in the track when it came to making medical decisions. I suggest you have a medical power of attorney legal piece of paper - I just kept giving out copies and no one messed with me. You do have to deal with hospitals and the first thing out of their mouth is, “Do you have a living will?” I always said, no, those are death wills, not living wills and heere’s my medical power of attorney. Living wills say do not resusitate and that’s a death sentence. Make a bunch of copies of your medical power of attorney for each of you and you hold the power to keep life going.

I can tell you from months of life and death deisions for him, hospitals would rather the problem be gone in severe cases.