"Til Joint Assisted Suicide Do Us Part"

More on health care and the culture of death:

British conductor Sir Edward Downes died last week, alongside his wife, at an assisted-suicide facility in Switzerland. Lady Downes was in the final stages of terminal cancer; Sir Edward was ailing ("almost blind and increasingly deaf," according to his son), but his condition wasn't fatal. He just wanted to die with his wife.

Of course, "just" probably isn't a fair word to use in this context; it minimizes the enormity of the decision—not to mention the profound commitment that these two people, married for over five decades, had to one another. But then again, in some ways it feels like precisely the right word: What could be more natural, more simple, than this decision?

And there's something of that bracing quality to the Times' newspaperly account of the Downes' final moments:

On Friday, the [Downes'] children said, they watched, weeping, as their parents drank “a small quantity of clear liquid” before lying down on adjacent beds, holding hands. “Within a couple of minutes they were asleep, and died within 10 minutes,” Caractacus Downes, the couple’s 41-year-old son, said in the interview after his return to Britain. “They wanted to be next to each other when they died.”

The son goes on to say, “It is a very civilized way to end your life, and I don’t understand why the legal position in this country [Britain] doesn’t allow it.”