Because I am practically alone in having avoided addiction, felonies, poverty, becoming handicapped, and/or morbid disabling obesity over the course of my life I have become the "responsible adult" in my family.
Over the last six years it has been my responsibility to oversee the end-of-life care for three people: my paternal grandfather and grandmother, and maternal grandmother.
My grandfather died at home of congestive heart failure. He spent a week on hospice in a medical bed in the living room staring at the ceiling, barely conscious due to the morphine and pain, pissing and shitting himself, as he slowly suffocated to death.
My paternal grandmother lingered for two weeks in the hospital due to an embolism after falling and breaking her hip. Again, two weeks bedridden staring at the ceiling barely conscious due to the morphine and pain, with a machine breathing for her, until diffusion/perfusion stopped enough that no mechanical or pharmaceutical intervention could oxygenate her blood enough and she died.
My maternal grandmother was the worst. Having fought off COPD for the last 20 years it finally became too much. After a year of coughing fits that led to torn muscles and spine/rib fractures leading to her being in a near-constant state of opioid-induced stupor the oxygen and albuterol stopped working and she very slowly and painfully drowned to death. She had been aware of her impending death for about two years and constantly expressed her desire to die on her own terms, but she had made the mistake of moving into an assisted living facility. So she spent the last few years of her life in a recliner hooked up to oxygen as the albuterol treatments got more and more frequent until the point that she would have to wake up every couple of hours 24 hours a day to do them, with coughing fits between them to the point that she would paralyze herself due to neck or back pain and spend six weeks on pain killers, unable to urinate or defecate or dress or eat without assistance, as it became harder and harder to breathe until she mercifully slipped into unconsciousness and died.
We already have medical aid in dying, it's called "giving a little more morphine every time the patient starts gurgling in order to 'soothe their pain'".
In a just world the patient has the choice to accelerate the process.
All men must die.
I will not die suffocating to death as I stare at a blank ceiling, blasted out of my brains on drugs, while a TV blares in the background to cover up the sobs of my family.
In my late sixties I am going to start going to the doctor complaining of back pain, stockpile enough Percocet to kill me, and when the time comes (with good fortune many many decades later) I am going to settle my accounts, write a note with some directions, have a party, and say goodbye.
That's why I'm "for" MAID.
I'm sorry that was your experience. You are correct that all must die. Unfortunately, most don't reckon with that fact until it is too late. Simply offering assisted suicide as an option doesn't solve that problem. It creates a much worse social problem and perverse incentives.
Refusing respiratory therapy or medication is not assisted suicide. Nobody has to die in an ICU or hooked up to tubes if that is not their choice and they prepare properly. And as you note, hospice painkillers given to alleviate suffering also not assisted suicide even if it has a double effect in accelerating inevitable death.
If you want to prepare an alternate plan to blast your brain out on drugs to the point of death that's your prerogative. That doesn't mean we should create a system where we doctors are in the business of deliberately killing their patients on demand (or worse, as it leads to, pushing this "service" on their patients).
I've always found what cats do admirable. I have never had to bury a cat. Once their time comes, they simply wander off, never to be seen again. It just feels like the right way to go.