There are all kinds of things we cling to after we should have let go. We can be possessed by our possessions, trapped in an abusive relationship, holding onto a job we sould have left, nurturing resentments and envies. The list is long.

There is also the clinging that comes from the fear of losing a loved one. This is evolution's way of protecting our children.

But when someone we love is aged, terminal and suffering, it is selfish to keep them alive for as long as medically possible, just to pospone our pain of loss.

Discernment must also be made about using painful means to extend any life for just a short time

In the early 1980's, I had young friends in the dorm in Oxford, when I was doing two years of post-doctoral socio-economic research.

A young friend came to me and asked if I would advise her fellow parishioner in 'Pip & Jim', the local Church of England.

I said, "Sure," expecting to advise her fellow parishioner on what camera to buy for her holiday.

The woman's 9-year-old daughter, her only child, had been diagnosed with advanced liver cancer. The doctor wanted the child to go to London for experimental chemotherapy that might extend her life for six months, and the mother wanted me, a total stranger with no medical knowledge about this, to make the decision for her.

I told the mother to leave her child in school with her friends, and this is what the mother did. (I never met the little girl.)

I finished my research in Oxford and went on to Spain, and my dorm friend kept me up to date on the little girl as she went through the grades with her school friends. Finally after more than two years, I got the letter that the little girl had suddenly died, not of the liver cancer, but of a different cancer.

I made that same decision for myself in my sixties, not to have life-extending massive surgery and chemotherapy after a diagnosis done from from a biopsy. I carried on with the symphony season feeling just fine. At the end of the season, the medical group phoned me. There was a mix-up with the biopsies. I was perfectly healthy. I did not ask what happened to the other woman, whose decision I had unknowingly made for her.