On a brisk day at a restaurant outside Chicago, Deb Robertson sat with her teenage grandson to talk about her death.
She’ll probably miss his high school graduation. She declined the extended warranty on her car. Sometimes she wonders who will be at her funeral.
Those things don’t frighten her much. The 65-year-old didn’t cry when she learned two months ago that the cancerous tumors in her liver were spreading, portending a tormented death.
But later, she received a call. A bill moving through the Illinois Legislature to allow certain terminally ill patients to end their own lives with a doctor’s help had made progress.
Then she cried.
“Medical-aid in dying is not me choosing to die,” she says she told her 17-year-old grandson. “I am going to die. But it is my way of having a little bit more control over what it looks like in the end.”
That same conversation is happening beside hospital beds and around dinner tables across the country, as Americans who are nearing life’s end negotiate the terms with themselves, their families and, now, state lawmakers.
The way you’re name dropping suggests you have a Wikipedia level knowledge of these things. The way you talk about Covid and how it was handled suggests you have a Facebook conspiracy theory level knowledge of the events that transpired.
Yes, ooohhh, a lot of mistakes were made. Yes, some government officials were huge irresponsible assholes.
None of that changes the fact that vaccines are not only important, they are vital in ensuring people won’t have to suffer from preventable illnesses. We NEED vaccines, like it or not.
What we as human beings also must do is start listening again to the experts, not to companies, not to politicians with their own agendas, and especially not to Facebook posts and YouTube or TikTok videos of self subscribed “lone wolf scientists”