Healthcare today is tending to end-of-life issues so much more openly than was common 30 years ago...even if it is imperfect in accepting death as an inevitable outcome of life. The costs involved in end-of-life care remain high not because dying is inexpensive, but because denying its inevitability levies extraordinary human and economic costs.

On Sunday, June 5th, 1983, my mother, Beatrice L. Mazer,  died of a heart attack, sparing her from the terminal cancer that the doctors were going to report to her the next day. I use the word “spared” because that is how all of us felt. My Mom skipped the pain, the anxiety, and the long and arduous process of dying from cancer. She just blinked and was gone. To this day, 28 years later, when we recount that day, we all agree that Mom “won.”

How can one gain as one loses? How can death be good when it means the end of life? And, how can rain end only to bring us the most glorious vision of a rainbow? The paradoxes of this life leave us only to continue to question and come up with only more questions. Such is the debate started by Jack Kevorkian and one that will live well beyond his own death not by suicide on June 3, 2011.