If someone around you died, and you knew it was going to happen, how would you feel? Guilty? Relieved? Confused? Overwhelmed? Would you have done anything you possibly could have to stop them? Would you have gone to the ends of the earth to do the best for their sake?
Before anyone becomes alarmed, this is a purely hypothetical matter that came to mind largely as a result of watching The Bedford Diaries. But it really is a valid question. We've reached the point in our lives where some things seem to become entirely unbearable, and sometimes people decide to take the available way out. As far as what we would or wouldn't be willing to do about their decision, it may or may not be the measure of true friendship.
On the one hand, it can be argued that if you didn't stop them, didn't refer them to a professional, didn't ruin your life and friendship to help them, you really failed them...because now they have no more life to continue thus. But on the other hand, they were unhappy, and how much can one really be expected to do as far as selfless labor goes.
When the question of life or death hangs in the balance, it is a question of what is the best decision for this specific person in this specific case? And nobody can be asked to make it. We don't have any right to bargain or decide over human lives, those of others or our own (at least in the strict sense that it will, regardless, affect the lives of others). If one is religious, it may be said that only God, or some other deity, has that right. But I am not religious, and do not consider any mortal being as having the jurisdiction over that decision. That there, the powerlessness of it all, is precisely what makes the question so complicated, so challenging.
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