From Life to Death in a Peaceful Instant.

Looking at the muscles and solid girth of my grandma's neck, I always secretly fantasized that she must have been some famous athlete in her younger, healthier days. How else could muscles like those develop?

Instinctively uncomfortable asking her about them, I really never broached the topic until I was about fourteen years old. To my despair, I learned not only of her absolute lack of athletic ability but that her solid bands of neck muscle developed due to a continual fight for breath. I felt so very stupid, for the only way I ever knew my grandma was sick in bed with emphysema. Every memorable conversation I ever had with her has been at her bedside. She's been there for me through the journeys of my life: learning to swim, adjusting to too-tight braces, getting my first real gold necklace and my first real girlfriend. I guess being bedridden literally made her a captive audience! But we bonded that way, and she captured my heart.

I watch my grandma, still in bed at least ten years since my earliest memories of her, except now I no longer talk to her but for stolen moments. She is too weak to talk and her breathing has become so deeply labored that most of the time I can't look at her. Yet I sit at her side as she drifts in and out of sleep.

I don't understand human suffering such as this. I used to try to find reason in the utter unreasonableness of grandma's illness. I know that modern medicine and a saintly live-in nurse are why my grandma is alive, but I angrily question the purpose of her life. She can't talk and breathe at the same time. She lives on baby food because chewing makes her breathless. I could write more, but the obvious bottom line is that it's grandma's time to die and yet she lives.

My mom worked for a veterinarian for years. She cries, wishing my grandma could be euthanized. She has witnessed euthanasia as a painless, instant process. The euthanized animal calmly lays down and goes to sleep. To Mom's best knowledge, there is no trauma whatsoever--from life to death in a peaceful instant. Why can't doctors, lawmakers, and patients legally choose a peaceful end to life when no more can be done?

What are the differences in our attitudes that make euthanizing animals a reasonable, sound choice but a legal battleground for humans? Why can't we value all forms of life equally and not let any living creature suffer?

All living things live and all living things die. It is this very fragility that makes life so precious. Why can't we humans develop a more natural attitude toward the life and death of our own species? We do not cry in despair when leaves fall off the trees in the fall, when birds fly south as the ,first frost appears. Why can t we open our arms to nature, go with the tides of life, instead of fighting against the current?

When people have outlived their life due to terminal illness, why can't we let them go? I believe our own mortality frightens us so deeply that it paralyzes our good judgment. We forget that embracing death is as natural as embracing life, particularly and poignantly when there is no more that can be done to help a terminal illness. If I could say just one thing to doctors and lawmakers it would be to trust and embrace nature and its lessons. Perhaps then my grandma could find peace.

David Miller is now eighteen years old and lives in Morton Grove, Illinois.