When Leigh’s cat Sugar was dying of congestive heart failure, the vet’s office offered her something almost no human being will ever be offered: the chance to hold her, to tell her she was loved and thank her, and to be present while a doctor helped her die without pain, without fear, and not alone. Afterward, Leigh’s first thought was, I hope my death is this good. Most of us won’t get one. We will die in a hospital bed, wired to machines, running up a bill somebody we love will inherit — and almost nobody says that’s what they want. Meanwhile, the last year of an American life is the most profitable one, and a dignified death has quietly become a luxury good.

Is there — should there be — such a thing as a “right to die,” the dark companion of the right to life we all assume we already have? We already honor a patient’s refusal of life-sustaining treatment; we let people sign DNRs, decline resuscitation, have the respirator removed. Is there any principled reason to honor that autonomy everywhere except the one place a person tries to use it? What is the “sound mind” requirement actually screening for, given that wanting to die was long treated as disqualifying all by itself? And can we talk seriously about dying with dignity inside a system that barely guarantees anyone the right to live with dignity?

Grab a drink — no hemlock cocktails, please — and join us as we ask what it would take to receive the deaths we already afford our pets.

• Euthanasia (active and passive)
• Voluntary euthanasia
• Physician-assisted suicide / physician-assisted dying
• Assisted suicide in the United States
• “Death with dignity” laws by state
• Euthanasia and assisted suicide in the Netherlands
• The Dutch government on euthanasia and the “due care” criteria
• Ilaria Bertini, “The Right to Die: Autonomy at the Limits,” Voices in Bioethics 11 (2025)
• Relational autonomy
• Care ethics / the ethics of care
• Feminist bioethics
• Immanuel Kant on autonomy and duties to the self
• Aristotle on friendship (Books VIII–IX of the Nicomachean Ethics)
• John Donne, “Meditation XVII” from Devotions upon Emergent Occasions
• Absurdism
• Advance directives and advance care planning
• Do-not-resuscitate (DNR) orders