Scott Adams on His Father’s Final Days

My father, age 86, is on the final approach to the long dirt nap (to use his own phrase). His mind is 98% gone, and all he has left is hours or possibly months of hideous unpleasantness in a hospital bed. I’ll spare you the details, but it’s as close to a living Hell as you can get.

If my dad were a cat, we would have put him to sleep long ago. And not once would we have looked back and thought too soon.

Because it’s not too soon. It’s far too late. His smallish estate pays about $8,000 per month to keep him in this state of perpetual suffering. Rarely has money been so poorly spent.

“Dilbert” creator Scott Adams wrote a polarizing post this weekend about how powerless he felt about his father’s end-of-life care, specifically, how neither he nor his father’s doctors could make the decision to end his father’s life to put him out of his suffering. We’ve talked a little bit about having end-of-life discussions before, but Adams is talking specifically about “doctor-assisted suicide” here, and it’s not clear what his father was suffering from and whether there was a living will or a health care directive. Adams’s father passed away a few hours after the post went up.

Photo: Martin Pulasky

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