A singer apologized, closed his eyes, dropped his head and died onstage

> Yet, by the way, why do they always use lethal doses of morphine for euthanasia?

Deniability.

Euthanasia is still illegal in most of the world (and yet is the moral thing to do at times). To avoid tangling with the long arm of the law, the medical staff overseeing a terminal patient will hint at what a deadly dosage would be, and leave the dosage control with a family member. So what if the coroner finds morphine - it's supposed to be there. 5-MeO-DMT (or any other non-medical compound), is far less innocuous, and could potentially open a legal can of worms for everyone involved.

Death is evil. It must be eradicated, like other nasty diseases. https://www.kurzweilai.net/death-is-an-outrage

A famous example from 80 years ago:

> Vierne suffered either a stroke or a heart attack (eyewitness reports differ) while giving his 1,750th organ recital at Notre-Dame de Paris on the evening of 2 June 1937. He had completed the main concert, which members of the audience said showed him at his full powers ("as well as he has ever played"). Directly after he had finished playing his "Stele pour un enfant défunt" from his 'Triptyque' Op 58, the closing section was to be two improvisations on submitted themes. He read the first theme in Braille, then selected the stops he would use for the improvisation. He suddenly pitched forward, and fell off the bench as his foot hit the low "E" pedal of the organ. He lost consciousness as the single note echoed throughout the church. He had thus fulfilled his oft-stated lifelong dream — to die at the console of the great organ of Notre-Dame. Maurice Duruflé, another major French organist and composer, was at his side at the time of his death.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Vierne

Okay, as a paramedic, who has lived in Australia and the UK as well as the US.

End of life quality of life is its own issue, regardless of who is or isn't paying.

Let me paint you a couple of examples and have you tell me about your desire to face any one of them rather than finding peace:

1) the lady with metastasized bone cancer who (thankfully) we were taking home so she could die there, as her family had set up a bed in a family owned home so she could watch the sunrise. She was a morphine drip for her pain. To be clear, most patients with cancer can be controlled by oral morphine at 200mg/day. She was receiving 120mg per HOUR. And still we had to drive the ambulance painfully (hah) slowly because every little bump in the road (not pothole, but bump) caused screams of pain from the back. Despite her being 45kg or so, we used six people to move her into the home (normally two would have done it) to make it as smooth a process as possible, and she was still incontinent from pain as a result). I do take some mild comfort in knowing she got to see two more sunrises out of hospital. But even as someone who has had multiple kidney stones (and large ones at that), I could not imagine enduring what she was.

You call it "living", it's not, I chose "enduring" for a reason.

2) A man who had Alzheimers with some lucidity. Maybe 10 minutes an hour. The other times he spent in terror, because he had a constant playback loop of about four separate WW2 scenarios where he was an infantryman in Europe. During those times he was entirely reliving the most terrifying experiences of his life, his eyes would be wide, his pulse would be 160+, he'd be shaking and unapproachable (because he _would_ attack you), pinned down by German troops in a French village. Or breaking his leg as he cut his parachute when he was stuck in a tree. Or when he was temporarily deafened by mortar and artillery fire landing near him, spraying him with mud and bricks and glass.

You're entitled to your own opinion as we all are. But it's certainly not a coincidence that _many_ people who have spent a good amount of time around end of life events want nothing less than to see it happen to them (or for their own loved ones to have to see it happen).

And all of the above, again, has nearly zero to do with "who is paying the bill".

And a seemingly subtle but very important distinction: it is not _ending_ someone's life to _not prolong_ it beyond nature. And trying to twist the parents remarks about "do not resuscitate" into "ending peoples lives" is a blatant reductionism that is neither merited nor fair. Apropos of anything else, a DNR is the written expression of the _patients_ wishes. Just as you want your own freedom.

We spend more in the last year (be it NHS, Medicare in Australia, or health insurance) of people's lives than we do in the last decade of their lives, and more in the last decade than we do on the rest of their life.

Symbolism is as subjective as it gets, an act can be interpreted as heroic by some people while others might think it's stupid. Meaningful moments don't exclude symbolic ones, they extend them by including banal moments like having an ice cream with your kid and enjoying it.