The Last Day of Her Life
Sandy Bem discovered she had Alzheimer’s and resolved to end her life before she lost her mind.
A Life-or-Death Situation
Margaret Pabst Battin, an expert in bioethics and right-to-die issues, comes to grips with the same questions in her own life, when her husband Brooke Hopkins is in a bicycling accident that leaves him quadriplegic:
“By the time Peggy arrived and saw her husband ensnared in the life-sustaining machinery he hoped to avoid, decisions about intervention already had been made. It was Nov. 14, 2008, late afternoon. She didn’t know yet that Brooke would end up a quadriplegic, paralyzed from the shoulders down.
“Suffering, suicide, euthanasia, a dignified death — these were subjects she had thought and written about for years, and now, suddenly, they turned unbearably personal. Alongside her physically ravaged husband, she would watch lofty ideas be trumped by reality — and would discover just how messy, raw and muddled the end of life can be.”
What Is It About 20-Somethings?
Why are so many people in their 20s taking so long to grow up?
Understanding the Anxious Mind
Watching this video again makes Kagan fairly vibrate with the thrill of rediscovery: here on camera is the young girl who, as an infant, first embodied for him what it meant to be wired to worry.