Anyone who works in a hospital emergency room can relate many stories of persons who come in under emergency situations and have suffered what appears to be a heart attack or have stopped breathing for other reasons. They are put on a breathing machine.

Some of these persons do not regain consciousness even after they are put on the breathing machine. Then after a period of days or sometimes weeks the doctor and family must make the decision to remove the machine. Often it means that the person will not breathe on his or her own and thus die.

Reaching the decision to remove the machine is always a very difficult and painful decision for the family members to make. It often seems to them, emotionally at least, as if they are causing the end of the life of their loved one.

Of course, this i…