Death: none of us can escape it.  We’re born; we die.  Or, as people in my family have said, “None of us are getting out of this alive.”

In my flash fiction story “Dr. Temple’s Eternal Cure,” I play with the idea of choosing the timing of when we’ll die. This question was explored in The New York Times Magazine this month in their piece “The Last Day of Her Life.”  The essay is about Sandy Bem, a professor of psychology at Cornell, who was diagnosed with a precursor to Alzheimer’s disease.  She decided to “figure out a way to take her own life before the disease took it from her.”

My story is fiction; Sandy Bem’s story is true.  But the question winds through both: should we be able to control our own death?