I've always wondered what people would do in this situation.

What would you do if your mother, father, husband, wife, etc. asked if you could help them die?

Lorraine Sommerfeld

Dr. Jack Kevorkian has been released after serving eight years in prison for helping a terminally ill man end his life. The RCMP just stopped considering charges against a Canadian man who took his dying wife to a suicide clinic in Switzerland. Definitions, degrees, legalities and semantics are all part of ongoing struggles many countries engage in regarding this issue.

Could you help someone you love to die?

I was 12 when I learned what euthanasia was. Until then, I'd only heard the word, never read it, and thought "youth in Asia" was about, well, just that. It was many more years before I thought about it with more than a passing interest. Nobody I knew was dying; nobody I knew was sick.

And then, like most things having to do with middle age, considerations and circumstances thrust me into the gaping maw of uncertainty long before I was ready. All of a sudden you must deal with towering pain that isn't your own, and you realize the path behind you has crumbled away as you've been laying the one ahead.

Both of my parents suffered from terminal illnesses; the illnesses were as different as my parents' approach to them, and experiencing one did little to help with the other. My father sucked the last few years of his life through an oxygen hose, angry and bitter as his strength ebbed away in coughs and gasps. He would no sooner have given up, or given in, than he would have understood anyone who did.

My mother was quiet and patient, her calm a mirror of her husband's rage. And it was she who made me promise to help her go when she decided the time was right. When I was a child and asking impossible questions of her, she would pat my hand, smile and tell me everything was going to be all right. When she asked me to help her die, all I could do was pat her hand and tell her everything would be fine. There was no smile behind my lie the impact of her words was shattering.

There were many late-night conversations with my wonderful friend Leah. She's a doctor, and this subject stalks the edges of the medical profession like a fox around a herd of sheep. It was this friendship that made my mother so certain I could assist her; I could just ask Leah for help.

Only I didn't want to get Leah in trouble. I didn't want to be confronted with breaking the law, but I didn't want to abandon my mother. She had made all these other rational decisions in her final months, yet legally, she couldn't make this one. My father had the option to fight; my mother should have had the option not to. And I should have had the option to fully support them both, regardless of their decision.

For everyone who dies, more live, and sometimes it's a fine line between alleviating a dying person's burden and creating another one.

In the end, my mother was still gently patting my hand and telling me everything would be all right. She died without me there, so I'll never know if she was disappointed by my inability to do the most important thing she'd ever asked of me. Ultimately, cancer made the call.

Would I have helped someone I loved to die? Seven years on, I still wrestle with this issue. And I'm sorry for so many of us that will be confronted with this very thing, and that the struggle remains unchanged.

But yes. I would have helped her.