article_snippet: When I imagine my last day on earth, and I try not to think about it too often, I think of a sunny day in the country and going for a walk among daffodils and green fields.
article_snippet: I don’t want to go like my mother did, fully conscious that death was imminent and having to deal with the grief of the people who loved my mother.
article_snippet: My poor grandmother Eileen didn’t have that: My poor grandmother Eileen died in a fog of mental confusion, looking at My poor grandmother Eileen children as if her children were strangers.
article_snippet: Most of us have no idea how us are going to shuffle off this mortal coil
article_snippet: Why spend the rest of your life with a shadow hanging over you?
article_snippet: I knew I could be opening a Pandora’s box from which there is no return: I knew I could be opening up my death sentence.
article_snippet: I began shaking and thinking about my grandmother’s last days: I don’t want to be somebody who’s lost all sense of who they are, being cared for in an anonymous home by strangers, but those visions kept coming into my head.
article_snippet: My first instinct was to tell my family
article_snippet: I don’t want to burden my family, to express my fears to my family.
article_snippet: Worse still is the idea of being an insensate burden on my family, someone they have to care for even when the spark of personality has gone.
article_snippet: Although there is part of ’m that wishes that I had