I have never had cancer, so I can't tell LW how to think about her disease. Honestly I think that anyone here who is trying to tell her how to feel is full of shit. You aren't LW, LW says she wants to die. What does it do to try to convince her to stay except make others feel better? But what about what makes LW feel better?

LW, if you want to die, it's ok. We all die. Not all of us have a choice to go out with dignity. If you can, then you will have a better death than most. I wish you peace, LW. The one thing I would say is that you should tell your loved ones how you feel, that you want to go. They will protest and cry, because they love you. But when you are gone it will be a comfort to them that you are no longer in a place you didn't want to be.

Oh yeah, and doctors who prescribe antidepressants for dying patients are sick. Of course the patient is depressed, they are dying! Dying is a process and we have the right to experience that mental and spiritual process without someone trying to dope us so that they can feel better because they don't know what to say to us. What a load of shit dying is in this country. I can't stand it. Live at all costs so nobody has to deal with death! We can all live in this artificial world and pretend like just the right chemicals, just the right life support machines will keep us alive forever. Of course, your human dignity doesn't matter at all. The process of reviewing our lives and examining the state of our souls is not necessary at all...because it's kind of uncomfortable for everyone else, the doctors, the family, etc. This is a sick society when it comes to death and dying. Is there any other country in this world that is more afraid of death and refuses to deal with it until forced to than the United States? And let's not even talk about how we deal with the grieving, they might as well not even exist, because for us to acknowledge and support them would be admitting that there is death in the first place. Ugh.

It strikes me that the people who are more affected by death are not the dying, but the people around them. We need that person to fight. To live just a little longer. For the death of someone close to us reminds us too much of our own mortality. And we are uncomfortable with this.

My grandfather died just over a week ago. Relatively quickly and painlessly, thankfully. In the bed next to his, an elderly woman was so doped up with painkillers that she could not focus on her family and was firmly entrenched in her own little fantasy world. Her daughter called in the doctor, frustrated by the fact that her mother was being so uncommunicative. Obviously her need to have her mother in full possession of her faculties and actively fighting meant more to her than ensuring her mother wasn’t in any pain

Anyway, the doctor came in and advised the daughter that he could reduce the meds, but only with the patient’s permission. After some prodding, she let it be known that yes, she was having trouble focussing and was drifting off into fantasy.

“What are you fantasizing about?” asked the doctor

“Kirk Douglas in his swimtrunks.” Came the response (I can only hope Spartacus-era Kirk Douglas)

“Is that a problem?”

“Oh no!” she replied quickly.

Fortunately thereafter, her daughter was silent on the matter. Hopefully when my time comes, my friends and family will be less concerned about whether or not I’m fighting, and more concerned with whether I’m seeing Salma Hayek in a bikini.

http://www.philly.com/mld/philly/16857790.htm

I can't criticize Cary for the advice he's given because I agree with him, more or less. Depression can be treated and it has a level of impermanence that death doesn't afford to those who choose it. I can see his side of the equation, but I also see the letter writer's side as well. This is someone who has decided that her life is something she no longer wants and is ready to let it all go. She just so happened to have a medical occurrence that made death more...approachable, as she would've been willing to die from the cancer if she had found it herself. Ultimately, this is a decision that she has to make for herself and I can't say what decision she should make.

I know the decision I've made in the past...and it's something I still battle with today.

While she has accomplished much in her life, I'm just a 20-something that's been suicidal since the age of 12. While it could easily be assumed that it was the whims of a moody teenager, these thoughts and feelings came from a host of factors that can leave any young person scarred and unable to cope without the assistance of therapy. These are feelings that do come back, often, and take a great deal of effort to cope with (because suppression is far worse & therapy is currently unaffordable).

It's tough to read the advice given to someone against suicide without getting a little angry at how most people address the situation [either by calling the person selfish or by saying it's a permanent solution to a temporary problem], so I applaud Cary for not trotting out those arguments.

Ultimately, this is her decision and hers alone. I can't condemn someone who wants to make the same decision I've made, tried, and failed at before; but I can hope that she can find something in her life that can help her change her mind.

If I were the LW, I wouldn't want to live either, with the kind of comments here: Spruce up your wardrobe! You attracted the cancer with your thoughts! Go ahead and die!

These people don't know anything about you, any more than I do. When someone is seriously ill, suddenly everyone is an expert (even if, or especially if, they have had no experience of the disease). You should have eaten more fiber. You ate too much trans fat. Your thoughts are making you sick (or your karma or your religion or your lack of religion). What did you do to bring this on?

And if you don't run around with a bald head and a pink pom-pom in each hand, celebrating the glory of breast cancer awareness, you're considered a spoilsport. These days cancer patients, especially breast cancer patients, are supposed to be perky and upbeat, taking part in marches with their arms around each other. Everyone wears a pink ribbon and a huge smile.

The flip side of this is women wasting and dying, often in great pain, and not always with a lot of social and family support. This is a very difficult and dark reality that our culture refuses to look at.

I haven't had cancer yet, but I am bipolar, and have plummeted from the screaming rapture of mania into the coalmine tunnel of depression many times. If the culture doesn't get cancer, it doesn't get mental illness either, because it doesn't want to. Mental illness scares the living shit out of people. "Madness" terrifies them, with subconscious images of movies such as The Snake Pit and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Jack Nicholson screaming and thrashing with smoke pouring out of his head.

I am sure that social stigma has often contributed to my wish to die. I have even tried it a few times, but I was so inept I couldn't even do that. Needless to say, my self-esteem wasn't too high at the time. I'd like to say that this latest episode was different, but it wasn't. It was the worst one I ever had. I yearned to die with all the yearning I've ever had in my life distilled into one poisonous potion. The only thing that kept me alive was my family, particularly my granddaughter. My daughter was so furious at me for "faking" my illness that she threatened to cut off contact with Caitlin. I thought I had already hit rock bottom several times (I'm also an alcoholic who nearly died before finding recovery), but this was the worst, the lowest, the darkest, the most abandoned I had ever felt. My own had turned against me, as I was no longer acceptable to them.

I wish I could finish this long rambling story with a wonderful ending: "And then I looked at the sunset, and a single star was winking at me and I thought: There must be a God to have created such majesty! And this God must love us all! And this God must love ME!" It didn't happen. I believed, and continue to believe, that God dropped me on my head, just for his/her own amusement. But I'm still here. Most days I don't want to die, though I still have some bad ones. I now have three more grandchildren, the blessing of my life. But that's about all. My blossoming career as a published author was aborted, and may never return. I don't feel like the same person. I am melancholy more often than not. No one knows about this, because I hide it so well. It's my rock to carry.

I don't think I will commit suicide, because I know it would hurt my family, and because I don't believe in killing. I don't even believe in capitol punishment, for God's sake, so how can I kill me? Life isn't always about feeling good, feeling fulfilled or connected or having a "meaningful" life. I am completely incapable of "being gentle with myself" (advice I received over and over) or "loving myself unconditionally" (impossible for a mental patient). So I will get along without it. Sometimes life is just about sitting there breathing, alive.