Okay, there are economic reasons for making the most of life while encouraging a shorter death watch. The Economist April 29, 2017 admonishes that living as long as possible isn't really the best way to go.

There are also reasons of human kindness and love.  The bar graph accompanying What Matters Most in the same edition of the weekly news magazine is not living as long as possible.  Only about 17% of Japanese, 40% Italians and 45% Americans want to live as long as possible.  Maybe they've seen and experienced enough with up-close views of the end-stage suffering still permitted in countries that don't understand the concept "death with dignity".

~

Death With Dignity Locations in the U.S.A.

• California (End of Life Option Act; 2016)
• Colorado (End of Life Options Act; 2016)
• District of Columbia (Death with Dignity Act; 2017)
• Oregon (Oregon Death with Dignity Act; 1994/1997)
• Vermont (Patient Choice and Control at the End of Life Act; 2013)
• Washington (Washington Death with Dignity Act; 2008)     Source: https://www.deathwithdignity.org/learn/death-with-dignity-acts/

Death in Tuscany

I am lying on a hillside in Tuscany pretending to be dead.  My body cells merge with the grass and dirt.  I would be the organic being I strive to be.  A wind courses through the trees, the few left by  industrious firewood harvesters.  They are wise enough to leave shade trees, well-spaced saplings and venerable flowering fruit trees.  

An octopus-shaped cloud obscures the sun.  A few minutes ago it was a flying goddess with a swan on her back.  The clothes under my body would be better on, but then have buried me naked so I know I am alive.

Green Graves

Jessica Mitford wrote extensively about the unnecessary procedures promoted by the opportunistic funerary industry in America in her ground-breaking (hah!) 1963 book The American Way of Death, reissued in 1998.  Embalming is not necessary, a waste of resources and a pollutant, not to mention an insult to the body and memory of the beloved deceased. Check out these resources for green gravesites.

Avoid embalming unless you are a Civil War soldier whose body will be sent back home by rail express, FedEx, UPS, or military cargo flight.

End of Life::Right to End of Life

YÉH√ **√HÉY 

there is no reason to be

afraid of death 

you get a new life

Celebrities  sometimes refer to whom they might have been, had they been, in a past life.

Songwriters, poets and  ordinary folks too, make off-hand comments explaining certain behavior as caused by a past life, or express a desire to do something in a future life.

Yet many people don't seem to get beyond the joking,

self-deprecating remarks to really study the self and the

experience that comes through lives and deaths, life and death.

The concept that the spirit lives beyond the body isn't new.

One way or another, it's been expressed by the world's

religions, secure in their authority won by the sword. 

Some faiths explain the soul returning to the

physical world, some would have the body reuniting with the spirit. 

Religion salvages the notion: not just here today, gone tomorrow.  

Is there a willingness to speak out, or at least mention the possibility, that the human spirit

endures?  Let's push the dialogue and share what we know about death. 

Communication about what people think and feel about life and death would help humans relax, understand their inner nature and prepare for the stages of the physical ending of

life and the advance into death.  

Myth-busting might change attitudes and release the care of the body and spirit for those approaching death, free them from the preachers, doctors and undertakers. We need to be sure that all have the right to their chosen care at end of life.  No extra permits, certificates, living wills and powers of attorneys.  The simple right to chose manner of death and care at end of life must be left to the individual and the chosen circle. 

I think we of human spirit should strive to reduce the impact of the

tangible and spend more time concentrating on the unseen world.

There is much more to see there.