Tell your boyfriend that it is NOT painless to dehydrate to death. My mom did not want to be kept alive by ANY artificial means at all. She made that very clear many times, and she executed all the paperwork and filed it with the nursing home when she moved in. When she had her last stroke that left her comatose, we honored her wishes. My sisters and I sat with her until she died which took seven days. On the sixth day, she started to moan with every exhallation. A nurse came in and put a pain patch on her, and she ceased moaning after about an hour. She died the next day. It's not painless. I was there, and I know.
Tell your boyfriend that it is NOT painless to dehydrate to death. My mom did not want to be kept alive by ANY artificial means at all. She made that very clear many times, and she executed all the paperwork and filed it with the nursing home when she moved in. When she had her last stroke that left her comatose, we honored her wishes. My sisters and I sat with her until she died which took seven days. On the sixth day, she started to moan with every exhallation. A nurse came in and put a pain patch on her, and she ceased moaning after about an hour. She died the next day. It's not painless. I was there, and I know.
Death by dehydration and starvation is not painless until the moment you die. My uncle flew B-29s in the Pacific during the war and, on one of those rare occasions when he would talk about his wartime experiences, he told me the story of one of the crews in his squadron whose plane went down in the Pacific. That crew survived the ditching and made their way to a coral atoll. They lost all their survival gear and all were injured in the ditching. They had no food or water, and were too weak from injuries to even try to catch food. They basically laid on the coral sand waiting to die. After a day or two they suffered from dehydration. Two men lost consciousness. The rest somehow refrained from drinking seawater, but after a couple of more days most were in some measure of excruciating agony, falling into hallucinations, not knowing reality from fantasy. Those men who were unconscious showed signs of pain by moaning, writhing about on the sand, or screaming during their sleep. Others who were awake tried to drink seawater or stuff sand into their mouths, but their friends held them back. He said the guys told him it was the most horrible experience they could ever have imagined. The crew was rescued after about a week by a PT boat that had strayed off it's patrol course. Just dumb luck, but they were saved.
Call that anecdotal evidence if you like, but no one will ever convince me that death by dehydration/starvation is painless or comfortable.