What is easiest way to die

For example, car exhaust with a high CO level will be more deadly than car exhaust with a low CO level. The second is ease of use. A method that requires technical knowledge is less accessible than one that does not. The third is accessibility. Given the brief duration of some suicidal crises, a lethal dose of pills in the nightstand poses a greater danger than a prescription that must be hoarded over months to accumulate a lethal dose.

Similarly, a gun in the closet poses a greater risk than a very high bridge five miles away, even if both methods have equal lethality if used. Jim Cleary, a physician in Madison, Wisconsin, specializes in palliative care , cancer-related pain relief, and discussing difficult diagnoses with patients.

That includes morphine, fentanyl, oxycodone, and many of the other drugs used to soothe patients in the United States.

Cleary says you can lump the different ways we die into categories. The first is the sudden death. The other category is the long death, which is what most of us will likely experience.

The odds that a man will develop cancer are 1 in 2; for women, 1 in 3. Reality, indeed. In long-death cases, most care does not extend life so much as extend the dying process, a fact noted by many end-of-life experts, from surgeon and author Atul Gawande to hospice patients.

Still, I press Dr. Cleary to answer the question at hand: How would he choose to die? It may be good for me, but it may not be good for them. NODA volunteers work in groups of nine. Each carries a pager 24 hours a day during their assigned shifts, so that one of them is always available to attend a death. Usually, a nurse makes the phone call summoning NODA volunteers. The vast majority of people who NODA visits are comatose. You need to be actively dying — estimated to pass in the next day or so.

And you must be without family or friends who can keep you company as you pass away. How does it happen that a person has nobody to visit when they die?

Maybe they do have family, but for whatever reason, the loved ones needed to leave, or live far away, or just cannot bear to be present. Some of the patients are homeless and, just as in their healthier days, have no one to comfort them.

Whatever the reason, NODA will be there. There are high-demand conferences where people share their personal experiences of loss and grief. There are bestselling books about coming to terms with your own mortality and how to prepare for death — spiritually, familially, and financially. Even Costco, the bulk-retail giant, sells coffins alongside its low-price tire changes and discount cruises. Death is never fully discussed, only hinted at from the margins. Gordon believes that now — with Baby Boomers entering retirement, many losing their parents, and many more coming to grips with their own mortality — is the moment to talk through these issues as a culture, to discuss the process of death in specific terms, beyond the anecdotal and platitudinal.

What matters is quality of life. Pamela Edgar is an end-of-life doula and drama therapist in Brooklyn, New York. Similar to how birth doulas help pregnant women bring new life to the world, end-of-life doulas help people on their way out. Edgar grew up with a mom who worked in nursing homes, and young Pamela sometimes tagged along, visiting people at different stages in their lives, including the final ones.

What can that be like? Edgar has worked in nursing home dementia units and other late-life facilities for the past eight years. After working in a Veterans Administration hospital during an internship as a creative arts therapist, she requested to go to the hospice unit.

What can we do for other people, how we define ourselves by these roles that are really about what we can do, or what we have. For many, dying becomes about control and autonomy, she says. Others get spiritual. It was a very peaceful passing for him. Edgar has been particularly affected by seeing choice taken away from patients. So there is that sense of going into an unknown and do people feel ready — body, mind, and spirit? Are they really ready to go? In the autumn of , the story of Brittany Maynard incited conversations on this topic in average American living rooms.

Maynard, a year-old newlywed, was diagnosed with an incurable brain cancer that gave her seizures, double vision, headaches, and other terrible symptoms that inevitably would intensify until her almost surely agonizing death. As she looked at that future, Maynard decided that she wanted to end her life on her own terms with the help of legal medication.

The answer, deep down, was no. And so I held on to that to keep me going, that little glimmer of uncertainty every time I thought about ending my life. Things had been going downhill for a long time. I had been suffering with severe anxiety caused by PTSD for several months, which had escalated to daily panic attacks. I experienced a constant feeling of dread in my stomach, tension headaches, body tremors, and nausea. It was a huge turning point, going from feeling everything at once to feeling nothing at all.

And, in all honesty, I think the nothingness was worse. The nothingness, combined with the same daily routine and toxic relationship, made my life feel utterly worthless. At the end of my rope, I turned to Google. Scrolling through post after post, I realized that actually, a lot of people understood.

A lot of people knew what it was like to not want to be here anymore but not want to die. We had all typed in the question with one expectation: answers. And answers meant we wanted to know what to do with our feelings instead of ending our lives. And maybe, I hoped, that meant that deep down, we all wanted to hold on to see if things could get better. And that we could. My mind had been clouded by the anxiety, despair, monotony, and a relationship that was slowly destroying me. To look at how things could get better if I attempted to make changes.

The reason I thought I was just existing was because I really was. I was miserable and I was stuck. But I did start to make changes.

I started to see a therapist, who helped me gain some perspective. My toxic relationship ended. I was devastated about it, but things improved so quickly as I started to exercise my independence.

Yes, I still got up every morning and made the bed, but the rest of the day would be at my hands, and slowly but surely, that started to excite me. I think a huge part of feeling as though I was just some form of existence was because my life was so predictable.