When you’re 30 years old feeling young and virile it is easy to feel offended that someone would seriously consider their own suicide. It’s easy to feel self-righteous, sanctimonious and above such a religiously offensive idea.

However, when you’re 65 or 70 years old and you begin to contemplate what disastrous, debilitating disease it will be your turn to endure, your perspective changes. It is no longer something you can put off to some vague time in the future. You have friends and family who have gone before you. You’ve seen them as they face their cancer or some such disease with its loathsome pain and their ignominious helplessness all alone; because dying is a one-man show. No matter who is around you, you do it all alone.

For those who have never known unremitting pain, no amount of rational perspective will convince you that anything is better than endlessly enduring. You may know about the claustrophobia from being in a confined space; but, have you ever experience the claustrophobia from continuous, inescapable pain? Felt the sense that you would cut off your arm or your very guts or even your head if you could just escape the closed-in claustrophobic feeling from pain without end; pain without any hope of surcease, not ever … until you die?

If you haven’t been there, don’t say “no” to someone who may want some way to end the unendurable. Initiative 1000 would provide some humane avenue of escape. The governor of Oregon has advertised that a similar law in Oregon did not cause any of the problems opponents of this measure claim, which, in fact, they also claimed for the Oregon law. No loving creator could ever be so cruel as to deny the thinking animals that we are the right to choose; how can we with our limited vicarious knowledge deny such a choice to our other fellow humans on this earth? Our creator intends for us to live and learn; not live and suffer: You’re not learning anything while you lay in bed, sedated and suffering. Vote yes on Initiative 1000.

RON G. RICE

Port Orchard