Do We Have The Right To Die If We're Terminally Ill? - Diane Rehm - #288

**Chris Williamson** (0:01)
Hello, friends, welcome back. My guest today is Diane Rehm, and we're talking about the right to die. Discussing the end of life is pretty uncomfortable, but watching someone who you love be forced to live on through pain is even worse. Diane's interviewed hundreds of people on the topic of assisted dying, from doctors to priests, terminally ill patients, and ethicists. So today, expect to learn why right to die laws are so complex, problematic, and applied differently across the world, what the difference is between euthanasia and assisted dying, how to broach the subject with someone you love, and much more. This is a bit of a change of pace today, but it's a conversation that I didn't even know existed, and is obviously something that we're all going to have to face. One of the few certainties that we have is that we're all going to die, and the people around us are going to, too. So I hope that this conversation frames what is an inevitability in a new light, and hopefully gets you thinking in a way that maybe makes things a little bit easier. In other news, this episode of the podcast is brought to you by fitbook.co.uk. They are the first company in the UK who provide the public with vetted and monitored health and fitness professionals. Everyone on FitBook is DBS checked and their work is monitored. Members say that their business wouldn't have survived 2020 if it wasn't for FitBook, and corporate LiveWire awarded them the Health and Fitness Business of the Year. Gyms are finally reopening again soon, which means that you fitness professionals out there need to kickstart your client base, and there is no better place to do it than on fitbook.co.uk. With the Modern Wisdom discount code, it works out with 38 pence per day to be automatically generating leads all the time and be exposed to thousands and thousands of potential customers in your area. It's literally cheaper than any other type of marketing that you could do. So before you think about spending money on Facebook ads or boosting an Instagram post, you need to be on fitbook.co.uk. Head to fitbook.co.uk/modernwisdom and use the code Modern Wisdom for 50% off your fitbook membership. That's fitbook.co.uk/modernwisdom and the code Modern Wisdom for 50% off. Also, if you're a customer and you're wanting to find yourself a new PT, you've put on, like everybody, a little bit of lockdown weight, perhaps. Head to fitbook.co.uk and you can browse all the vetted and checked fitness professionals. For free, find yourself a PT, a masseuse, a chiropractor, whatever it is that you need, fitbook.co.uk. But for now, it's time for the wise and wonderful Diane Rehm.
Diane Rehm, welcome to the show.

**Diane Rehm** (2:55)
Thank you, good to be with you.

**Chris Williamson** (2:58)
Why did you write a book about people's right to die?

**Diane Rehm** (3:03)
Understand, please, that first came the documentary, and then we were a year into the documentary which I both narrate, and I am the interviewer, when I decided to write the book based on the documentary. So, just to be clear, the documentary came first. The book is representing 25 or so of the 50 interviews that I did during the film process around the country. And I think, Chris, it goes way back. My mother died at 49 I was 19 She had liver cancer. She was in terrible pain and begged to die. And nobody listened, and she suffered.
My father died 11 months later of a broken heart. When my husband of 54 years, my late husband, John Rehm, and I were married, his father and mother were both alive. And then at age 72, his father who was living alone on a farm in Pennsylvania after having had a career in journalism had diabetic retinopathy. He could no longer see.
And he took his own life. And then at age 92, my mother-in-law who had terrible back pains, terrible headaches about which nothing could be done that she was willing to do, for example, surgery. She took her own life. So the idea of making a decision about your own life and when it should end has really been in my mind for a very long time.

**Chris Williamson** (5:51)
This is a very uncomfortable topic for most people to discuss, isn't it?

**Diane Rehm** (5:57)
Most people would rather not talk about death. I can remember speaking at a church in upstate New York and there were about 350 people in the congregation. And I started out by saying, how many of you are planning not to die? And of course, there was this little tether within the congregation, a nervous tether. People who really don't want to talk about death, it is the last taboo. They would rather pretend it's never going to happen, as children do. But we as adults must reach a point where we are not only willing to talk about it, we need to plan for it, so that we, if we choose not to, don't end up in a hospital attached to all kinds of tubes and oxygen and seeing, hearing nothing, just dying.