"Well, has mom agreed to this?"

"That's not a suicide pact, Dad. It's a murder-suicide."

Not to get all 'Lives' on everyone, but a piece in today's "Science Times" made me think of me, me, me! Or, at any rate, my family.

It's the account of a woman who's promised her mother in vague terms that she'll "help her out" should she ever fall ill, knowing full well what this means to a woman who's a member of the Hemlock Society. And it brings up those cases which are less black and white, even for those who find the issue a straightforward one: when the politics of "assisted suicide" don't have a whole lot to do with the misanthrope in question. Take my grandpa!

I've mentioned Grandpa Moe before, a known eccentric who hoarded clocks by the thousands, buried gold bars under the house and kept a deep-freeze full of beef sides in preparation for a vague apocalyptic happening known as "The Bad Times." To call him a pessimist is an understatement: he believed every year was his last, that he'd never live to see a grandchild, that ill-health and dementia were stalking him. He was also a eugenicist (he thought "stupid people" should be fixed), and so wildly "pro-choice" (not that I think anyone of that movement would have been particularly eager to claim him) that he regularly scandalized local pro-life protesters with his arguments for mandatory abortions based on IQ. Needless to say, he had no moral qualms about the issue of euthanasia. When I was pretty young, he took me aside, much as the mother in the Times article does, and asked me to shoot him if he ever "lost it."

In the article, the dutiful daughter agrees. In the end, she is spared a terrible choice when her mother has a swift natural death. In my grandfather's case, things were not so simple. After my grandmother died, he lost all will to live — but then, how much had he ever had? At 87, there was nothing physically wrong with him, but he sunk into a deep depression that quickly led to a general physical deterioration. He grew cadaverous and never left the bed. Then he started the suicide attempts: in his weakened state, he was rather easily disarmed when he went for his guns and swords (yes, an arsenal was necessary for The Bad Times) and tried to hang himself, but when he went on hunger strike, there was not much to do.

People have heard that and asked, "why didn't anyone call 911? They could have put him on an IV, maybe given him antidepressants." Maybe. But no one did. Oddly enough, it had little to do with his "right to die" — if you'd asked many people involved about the politics of it, you'd have found their views far more complex than the story might suggest. We saw it as his wish more than his right, perhaps, but also an act of monumental hopelessness that, at the end of the day, was of apiece with the way he had lived his life. It was certainly what he wanted, but it had less to do with dignity than with the affirmation of a philosophy which, as the days drew on, rapidly ceased to seem an amusing eccentricity and more something deeply sad and rooted in fear. To call it political is silly; my grandfather, much as I loved him, was unwell and his views had no business being imposed on anyone.

In this regard, I thought the Times piece was right: to the extent the personal is political, of course there are ramifications, but the stories are personal and unique. As the piece's author puts it, "my mother had been ready to die for years. Not that she was suicidal, but she had always been one of those people who found the cloud in every silver lining. For my mother, life’s positives outweighed its negatives, but just barely." For my own grandfather, anything less than an ending of despair and doom would surely have nullified the cloudy outlook that had guided his every adult action. What he found in his kind of death was, in a sense, a grim sort of self-fulfilling satisfaction. Why weren't five children, six loving grandchildren, years of health an enticement? Well, that was not what he had planned on. And there is comfort in the expected.

Keeping A Promise When A Life Is Near Its End [New York Times]

Elizabeth Barry of the University of Warwick finds that widely-read obituaries were one of the first ways regular people attained celebrity — albeit posthumously. People's life stories were run as cautionary tales in the 17th century — showing the consequences of wicked or virtuous living — but quickly became a popular human interest read. Initially, the obits featured royalty and other public figures, but the genre grew to include all kinds of people who'd led interesting lives. Says Barry, "Different kinds of deaths came to be commemorated and you didn’t have to be something like a military hero or be a political player or be some sort of high person in society to get public commemoration on your death."

Eventually, the obit-mongers were criticized for catering to low-brow tastes hungry for scandal. But Barry feels the universality of death acted as an equalizer and created the sense of identification that characterizes the modern celeb-public relationship. Of course, by any standard this is a conveniently reductive definition of celebrity - weren't the "military heroes and political players" already kind of celebrities? - but the notion of a fleeting, arbitrary celebrity, manufactured for public entertainment and then discarded, is certainly a unique phenomenon. If Barry's theory holds any water, there's a pleasing neatness to the notion of a life, reduced to a few paragraphs for strangers' delectation, with the veneer of beneficence. Wholly public, yet completely selfish. When Rupert the Baby Deer died last month - only a day after we'd learned about his existence - our shared grief was overwhelming. A friend mused that in a sense this mini emotional roller-coaster was really our celebrity-obsessed age to scale: the emotion is no less real for its lack of depth, but as the stories end, so too does our interest. The tragedy is somehow a neat cap to the narrative. From death cars to autopsies, we feel a right to know how and why things ended - to know if the end was just or tragic. Maybe Barry's onto something.

Dead People In 1700s Were The First Celebrities[Live Science]