aafa12,+writings+of+school,+Aaron

made many changes, but only kept broad information at end of paper.

Rain in the Willamette valley of Oregon is common knowledge; it is so well known that people think that all of Oregon receives drenching rain. But Southern Oregon is a bone dry desert that is home to oak savannah’s as far as the eye can see. Southern Oregon in the winter will get rain in Ashland and Medford, a pair of small towns nestled in the Cascade Mountains. As the month of December set in, a boy, his sister, and his mother pulled their grandfathers car into the parking lot of a hotel. The rain came down in steady, dreary silence. The sky had opened up and released its content of dark water down on the town of Medford nearly two days ago, and had hardly stopped since. Night was nearly upon the family and they soon found themselves in a small hotel room that smelled of cleaning chemicals and soap. These were some of the victims, they were the people who had to make a decision that would affect themselves and the people around them. The house on 927 Stanley Avenue is a small ranch style home with original siding and dark wood shingles, the house itself was made of wood, as are many of the houses in Oregon, and the gardens were lush and fertile with flowers along the path from the sidewalk to the front door. Each flower was wilted from the rain which made the plants themselves look sad, the front lawn was sopping wet, and even the trees looked damp and cold. Yet the rain continued to pour. The 90’s era Buick pulled into the driveway and the small family climbed out and rushed to the safety of the front door under the awning. There was no need to ring the doorbell, but they did anyway, it was quickly opened by a young looking, skinny woman in dark clothing. She silently moved to let them enter, and then shut the door to the dismal scene outside. The house was quiet inside and dim, the festivities for the time of year were not present in this house. As the children looked around the dining room they had walked into, the boy could almost see the silhouettes of previous children, who were now adults. He also remembered running through the house too. As he turned from the living room, a long, dimly lit hall stretched out before him. The world slowed to an almost unbearable snail’s pace as the boy moved to the end of the hallway. At the end there was a door, it was slightly open, but even through this small space, yellow light poured into the hallway. The boy opened the door; he knew that what he was going to see was going to frighten him. He knew he had to brace himself for what he was going to see, but nothing could have prepared him. Two years ago, the boy’s grandmother had looked the picture of health that is for a woman of seventy-three. But there had been a change, when he had seen her last she had looked different, thinner, older. What the boy saw today was not that woman either. She looked very old and very frail, she was bedridden and the life could almost be seen draining from her eyes. The end of life is the hardest thing for a family to go through, the fact that people don’t like to think about their own mortality is because of the fear of death. Naturally, they aren’t going to want to talk about someone else’s death either. When a person dies, or begins to go through the process of dying, it is always hardest on the families, but usually, the process is fairly quick and without incident. Other times, people will intentionally or unintentionally avoid death and live with a sickness that makes life unbearable. The death of a family member is even more painful, when a family member dies, it forces the rest of the family to talk about death. Wills must be discussed and possessions that remind the family of the deceased. But a family that has a family member close to death can be even worse, if a person is still alive but has a disease that is killing them slowly and painfully can have a much more stressful affect on the rest of the family. Huntington’s disease is a genetic disease that is programmed to slowly destroy brain cells. What makes it such a horrible disease is because the patient is conscious until the very end. The dilemma in the United States today is whether a person with a fatal disease who cannot bear the pain and wants to end their own life be allowed to. In the case of a patient with Huntington’s disease, the United States doesn’t know if the patient should be allowed to stop taking the drugs and let themselves die if they know what is going to happen. It is an even harder challenge with patients who are possibly mentally unstable. If a man in a nursing home and he is mentally unfit to live without professional help, should he have the right to humanly end his life if he so chooses, or is the mental disease making him delusional. Another example that combines the two problems is the case of a woman by the name of Ruth Klinkenbeard (Spelling?). She was a Parkinson’s disease patient who was in the care of a nursing home in Corvallis, Oregon. When the disease got so bad that Ruth couldn’t speak anymore and had to have feeding tubes, she made a decision, the decision that each and every human on this Earth must make. Ruth pulled out her feeding tubes not once, but twice. The first time the doctors were able to save her and put the tubes back in, but the second time, when the nurse arrived to check on her, she was dead. The eternal question was of course, why? Was Ruth Klinkenbeard acting as herself, had the disease become so agonizing and embarrassing that she would rather end it all, and rest in peace, or was the disease making her move and in her movements, the feeding tubes came out? In Oregon there is a solution, with the consent of the family and two doctors, a patient over the age of 60 with a fatal disease that will kill them in six months, they can use the Death with Dignity Act. The DWDA allows the patient to get a prescription for a drug that will kill them quickly and painlessly. Of the 88 prescriptions filled out in 2008, 54 patients took the drug.