The Last Day of Her Life
In The New York Times Magazine, Robin Marantz Henig writes about the political and moral consequences of Sandy Bem’s decision to take her own life after being diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. “The old Sandy, who valued her rationality and her agency, had been clear that she would be unwilling to keep living when she could no longer articulate coherent thoughts,” Marantz Henig writes, but as Sandy, once a professor of psychology, lost her memory, it became more difficult to decide when the right time for death might be. “Ultimately, who should make the decision to die, the old Sandy or the new one?”