April 22, 2006

My Living Will

To my family and my friends, I love you very much. I have been very blessed by your presence in my life and have enjoyed every moment I was able to be with each of you. I hope that my presence in your lives has been thanks enough for all that you have given me and that what I have written here furthers our relationship with one another.
I have a firm belief that what I have been able to give to others is a compilation of physical, psychological and spiritual blessings. These do not have to stop after I die and I hope they do not. The principles I have tried to live out and the things that I believe in are things I learned from each of you and hopes I leave with you. Compassion for others and ourselves, peace for everyone and everything and love at every moment must be the message you each preach if you want to honor me and how I lived.
That should guide your decision in determining whether to leave me on life support as clearly as it should guide your decision to love someone who killed me out of anger, hate or indifference. I may not be able to make the decision to end my own life, if for example my ability to think clearly is compromised in an accident, but it is a decision that I want to be made by you as the closest people to me in my life. I do not fear death, but I do fear the possibility that anyone could live a life worse than death. If you lived out of fear, anger or indifference or lose all sense of your own inner peace due to something that happened to me, that would be much worse than any death I could experience. I believe compassion, peace and love win out and that we each have the capacity to see these things through in each of our lives. In any decision you make on my behalf or in my memory, please put compassion for others and yourself, peace for everyone and everything and love at every moment first. Thank you. I love you all very much.