A Traumatic Experience: A Life Or Death

A Traumatic Experience If you were in a life or death situation, what would you do? This is what A Life-or Death Situation from the New York Times is primarily about. This article is about a person who goes through one such situation. The author 's purpose for writing this is to present what could happen in a life or death situation and the use of assisted suicide if need be. Some main points may include how the wife in the story defends the reasoning’s in a few court cases, how she personally deals with her situation, and how she helps other people seeking the same problem. The article starts off, before the accident and how it happened. In the beginning, it talks about how the accident first occurred and how dramatic it is. Brooke, the

It briefly illustrates their life before the accident, stating how Brooke, the husband, is known for his personality and enthusiasm around friends and family. Next, it goes back to reality with the husband who is now paralyzed from the shoulders down and receives 24 hour care from nurses and in-home caretakers. “[T]he university’s excellent health insurance, which covers a large portion of Brooke’s…doctor bills… Peggy spends a lot of time with the insurance company… she and Brooke were lucky to have had a healthy retirement fund… but she does not know how many more years they will be able to sustain this level of high-quality…care”(57-58.) The wife is still working as a professor full-time to support all of his expenses. As time went on the author talks more about Brooke who is also a retired professor and how he still tries to live a normal still teaching a small class of older students at his home. The author uses this to assure people that you still can live through a life or death situation and cope with it the

“[H]e decided he could not go on living that way… he wrote on July 28, 2012… what he called a ‘final letter’ to his loved ones, explaining why he wanted to die” (62-63.) This shows how after all these years he was ready to say goodbye to life. While this did not happen initially the letter was still written and the wife just overlooked the letter thinking he was just stressed at the time. As time went by he became his regular self again. The wife still continued to watch over him and was ready to aid him in his decision to die at any time. The author wrote this to show the hard times people go through in a situation such as this and how if he was actually ready to end his life, it would have been so with the aid of assisted suicide and medications. Wanting the audience to believe that assisted suicide can be useful to people who want it and have the ability to have access to it. Brooke wanting to give his life up happened again sometime later and this time his wife and caretaker at that time went through with disabling him from everything that kept him alive and breathing. While he was waiting to die nothing happened as the wife told him later on that he could still function properly for a short amount of time without all his machines and tubes intact. “Finally he announced that he wanted to turn off all the machines. He wanted to