A Billionaire Looks at Death

A nice young man from LA was in NYC yesterday, and we met over drinks to talk about death. Specifically, we talked about an article about death that I wrote a year ago, which he was hoping to turn into a feature film. This kind of thing happens often, mostly to other journalists, for a Hollywood screenwriter to express an interest in buying movie rights to a piece of nonfiction writing. But it's rare for all the complex moving parts of filmmaking to fit together in a way that leads to actual theatrical release of an actual, commercially successful movie based on one's article.

Still, the nice young man and I had a lovely time talking over drinks at a bar on the Upper West Side. The article he wanted to turn into a film was about a woman in her 60s who was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease, who wanted to end her life before she became so demented that she thought her life was no longer worth living. It was published in the spring of 2015 in The New York Times Magazine.

In the course of talking about this woman's dilemma, and whether she had to make her decision before she was really ready to die (at a time when she was still competent enough to take all the lethal steps on her own, without implicating others in her death), we got to talking about the left-leaning billionaire George Soros. The young man told me that he knows that Soros has a special interest in end-of-life decision-making, inspired partly by his mother, who had strong feelings about it. He told me to look it up on Wikipedia.

So I just did.

It's buried down there toward the end of the Wikipedia entry, after sections on Soros' difficult early life in Hungary during World War II, his controversial economic theories, and his conviction in France for insider trading in 2005. But there it is, in a speech Soros gave in 1994 about offering to help his mother, a member of what was then known as the Hemlock Society (now called Final Exit Network), end her life when she thought the timing was right. As he said in the speech, which was delivered to an audience at the Columbia University medical school in New York:

She had at hand a means of doing away with herself. I asked her if she needed my help; I offered it, although I wasn't particularly keen to do it. But I would have helped her because I felt that I owed it to her. At the point of decision, however, she did not want to take her own life, and I'm glad she didn't. Her decision gave the family a chance to rally around and be there as she prepared to die.

I was glad to hear that Soros has such a long-standing interest in end-of-life decision-making, dating back to this speech and to the Project on Death in America that he was funding at the time. In my opinion, giving people the power to end their lives when their suffering becomes unbearable is one of the most profound issues we face as a society. So while I'm glad I got to speak to the nice young man from LA about the possibility of making a film based on the death and life of the woman in my magazine article, the thing that was really nice about meeting him was that our conversation gave me something to think about as I look around for my own next writing project.