July 21, 2010

The BBC recently posted this extraorinary video and story on Richard Rudd, who was in a motorcycle accident in 2009. His dad now says, “We all sit round and talk in the pub or at work and say ‘if this happened to me, turn the machine off’ . . . It’s all hypothetical and you don’t know until it happens to yourself. As a family and friends, if that person can’t decide for themselves, sometimes you feel that you can decide for them . . . Because, in theory, you think you can never live in that situation, you sometimes put that judgement onto somebody else . . . At the end of the day, you probably have no right to do that . . . But now Richard’s in the situation where that’s actually happened. It’s real life – it’s not pretend. He is in that situation . . . The will to live takes over.”