From the New York Times, a piece about facing death with grace and dignity.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/10/opinion/sunday/10als.html?_r=1&ref=opinion

OPINION

The Good Short Life

By DUDLEY CLENDINEN

Published: July 9, 2011

Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

Dudley Clendinen, who has Lou Gehrig's disease, at his home in Baltimore last week.

I HAVE wonderful friends. In this last year, one took me to Istanbul. One gave me a box of hand-crafted chocolates. Fifteen of them held two rousing, pre-posthumous wakes for me. Several wrote large checks. Two sent me a boxed set of all the Bach sacred cantatas. And one, from Texas, put a hand on my thinning shoulder, and appeared to study the ground where we were standing. He had flown in to see me.

“We need to go buy you a pistol, don’t we?” he asked quietly. He meant to shoot myself with.

“Yes, Sweet Thing,” I said, with a smile. “We do.”

I loved him for that.

I love them all. I am acutely lucky in my family and friends, and in my daughter, my work and my life. But I have amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or A.L.S., more kindly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, for the great Yankee hitter and first baseman who was told he had it in 1939, accepted the verdict with such famous grace, and died less than two years later. He was almost 38...