Give our generation the choice in death that we've had in life The results of this survey are heartening for our lucky generation, perhaps the most privileged in history. We were born after the war, we’ve benefited from the welfare state and had choice in almost everything — education, having children and employment. So it is galling that in our middle years we should feel a corrosive dread about the final certainty — death. To know that we have no right not to suffer, that we might be kept alive in a vegetative state against our will, is an awful reverse.