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The protagonist of Leoŝ Janáĉek's opera The Makropulos Case , Emilia, is a woman who, some three hundred years after having drunk a magic potion of eternal life, considers her existence as a terrible curse. But it is death, and not life, that we tend to think of as a curse! Death, a sooner-or-later inevitable fact for us all (even if unconsciously we believe otherwise), is something that most of us dread and try to postpone with all means at our disposal in the hopeless, and rather naïve, attempt to deny its reality. However, as demonstrated by the large number of suicide cases in all societies and throughout history, there are plenty of circumstances when death can be longed for rather than dreaded, and anticipated as the ultimate liberation from one's sufferings (be these physical, mental or both), or even just from the limitations imposed by old age.
Our culture, through its technological advances in medicine, surgery and even cosmetics, all supported by enormous commercial interests, inexorably seduces us into paying almost any price in order to prolong life (and productivity and potency and beauty), while any effort to shorten it, even when such circumstances as a painful and undignified terminal illness seem almost to demand it, are often met with legal restrictions and moral outrage. As a result, any initiatives in that counter-flow direction are left to brave (or sometimes greedy) individuals prepared to take the risks upon themselves, and to well-meaning (or sometimes unscrupulous) institutions such as the famous one in Switzerland called Dignitas.