One thing you should know is, for a lot of patients, it's not a choice between living and dying, but rather, a choice between quick death and slow death. When my mother was in her final days, with her eating ability impaired and needing a tube down her nose to get nutrients in, she chose to die. The doctors were willing to respect that wish, but when she asked them to "help me die faster," they told her that this was not an option. If Kevorkian had been around our hospital at the time, she would have asked for him. Now, death by refusing food gets painful, not just because hunger is painful, but even more than that, because when the body is shutting down, one of the first things to happen is that the tips of fingers and toes lose their blood circulation, and that's very painful. Add to that the bureaucratic snags that sometimes delay getting morphine when it's needed... Point is, for at least some of his patients, Kevorkian was about making death more painless. And I definitely don't get the impression he was doing it for kicks.