"I am about to kill my mother"

Sarah Lyall:

I am looking for a way to put this off as long as possible, and so I start watching one of the final episodes of the TV drama “The Americans.” Today, Keri Russell, playing a Russian agent, is spying on a State Department official by posing as a nurse for his terminally ill wife.
The agent is a stone-cold murderer, but she feels desperately sorry for the official, whose attempts to help his wife kill herself with morphine have left her in a gasping, not-dead limbo. So Keri Russell finishes the job by shoving a paintbrush down the woman’s throat and holding a plastic bag over her head.

This is not a good time to be watching this particular scene.

Right now my mother is in bed across the hall, in the endgame of Stage 4 lung cancer. She is nearly 83, she has had enough, and she is ready to die. More specifically, she is ready to have me help her die.

I can see her point.

An unsentimental, practical person, she has for many years been preparing for the moment when death would become more alluring than life. We have talked about it nonstop since she received her diagnosis about three months ago and, like Gloria Swanson going up in a blaze of grand pronouncements, declared that she intended to forgo chemotherapy... (continues)

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Vaccines and Immunity

BETWEEN HOPE AND FEAR 
A History of Vaccines and Human Immunity 
By Michael Kinch
334 pp. Pegasus Books. $27.95.

As Michael Kinch tells us in “Between Hope and Fear: A History of Vaccines and Human Immunity,” vaccinations have saved millions, possibly billions, of lives. Along with antisepsis and anesthesia, they rank as one of the greatest achievements of scientific medicine. It is therefore deeply disturbing that in recent decades a significant minority of people in the world’s wealthier countries has become opposed to them. This anti-vaccination movement has even been given the nod by Donald Trump. To be effective, a vaccine requires that at least 95 percent of a population receive it — a phenomenon known as “herd immunity.” If even a small number of parents decide not to have their child vaccinated because of an alleged (and usually spurious) risk from the vaccine, they are putting enormous numbers of children at risk of contracting the disease the vaccine protects against.

Until the 19th century, human life was dominated by infectious illness. Up to 50 percent of children died before the age of 5, almost all from infections. Long exposure over centuries to some of these pathogens yielded some resistance, but the devastating potential of infectious diseases was demonstrated when Europeans arrived in the so-called New World. In Cuba and its surrounding islands, it is estimated that one-third of the population was killed by smallpox beginning in 1518, and two-thirds of the survivors by measles in 1529.




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Natural solace

	Robert Macfarlane (@RobGMacfarlane)
9/9/18, 7:30 AM "In the hospice where I work, I am often struck by the intense solace some patients find in the natural world": take a few minutes to read ⁦‪@doctor_oxford‬⁩'s beautiful & moving essay the power of nature & living joyfully, right to the end of one's time. nytimes.com/2018/09/08/opi…