Commentary A good friend of ours died last year of a slow-growing but inexorable form of lung cancer. In his final months, he received expert outpatient care from a team of palliative-care specialists. When the end was imminent and breathing became difficult, he was asked if he preferred lucidity with suffering, or comfort. “Comfort,” he whispered. His medication was adjusted, and he relaxed into sleep. He died peacefully the next day. A few months previous to his death, his wife, distressed at his now-rapid decline, had wondered aloud to me if she should introduce the subject of MAiD—medical assistance in dying, i.e. euthanasia—to their ongoing conversation about his condition. (The term MAiD was stolen from palliative care by the euthanasia lobby in order to obscure the bright moral line between easeful transition to a natural death and killing by lethal injection.) I begged her not to. I said her husband …