Do people have the power to choose when they die?

My mother recently died after six years with liver cancer. (Liver cancer has a 95% mortality rate within five years, so she was quite fortunate.) For the last two weeks of her life, she was in a hospice, and she was only lucid for the first few days – with one exception. I have a brother, and he hadn’t seen our mother for more than five years. He recently had a child, and I know my mother had been praying that she’d live long enough to see a grandchild. Since I’m asexual, she knew it certainly wouldn’t be emerging from my loins. I convinced my brother to bring his new, week-old daughter to see our mother in the hospice and, to everyone’s surprise, my mother was completely lucid for the duration of his visit. In fact, despite the fact she was dying in terrible pain and doped up with massive amounts of morphine, she had the strength to sit up, make conversation, and hold the baby. She never regained full consciousness after that, and she was dead within a week.

The doctors at the hospice had told us when my mother arrived that, from their experience and her condition, they estimated she had “more than days, but less than months.” After seeing her grandchild, it was as if all the life went out of her and my mother’s condition deteriorated rapidly.

My father and I wanted to be there when she died, so the hospice called us when they knew the end was near. It took me about an hour and a half to get to the hospital by bus; my father arrived much earlier. The instant I arrived in the hospital room, my mother’s breathing began to slow, and she was dead within five minutes. Despite the fact that she was unconscious and thoroughly doped with morphine, it’s as if she waited for me to arrive before she allowed herself to die.

Out of curiosity, while I was organizing the services with the funeral director I asked him about my experience. What he told me is that he’d been doing the job 25 years and that, from his anecdotal observations, my experience was the norm rather than the exception. He related a story about his own father, for example, who had a friend he had wanted at his bedside when he died. As his father lay dying, unconscious, the funeral director said he told his father to hold on, and that his friend was on the way. Again, it was about twenty minutes before his friend arrived and, five minutes after that, his father was dead.

We know from studies that there is no such thing as “the will to live.” Studies in which doctors were asked to rate the “will to live” of their patients showed there was absolutely no correlation between outcome and the doctors’ estimation of the patient’s willingness to fight for life. And yet, it seems as if people have the capacity to decide, within certain ranges, when they wish to take their final breath.

What about you folks? Do you have any similar personal experiences? Do you think people have the capacity to choose when they die, even if they’re unconscious?