'How We Die' author loved life
HAMDEN, Conn. — Sherwin Nuland, a medical ethicist who opposed assisted suicide and wrote an award-winning book about death called “How We Die,” has died at age 83.
He died of prostate cancer on Monday at his home in Hamden, said his daughter Amelia Nuland, who recalled how he told her he wasn’t ready for death because he loved life.
“He told me, ‘I’m not scared of dying, but I’ve built such a beautiful life, and I’m not ready to leave it,”’ she said Tuesday.
Sherwin Nuland was born in New York and taught medical ethics at Yale University in New Haven. He was critical of the medical profession’s obsession with prolonging life when common sense would dictate further treatment is futile. He wrote nature “will always win in the end, as it must if our species is to survive.”
He said that when he was a boy death was a natural phenomenon, accepted when certain signs and symptoms showed it was near.
