As of Tuesday afternoon, no one outside of the Ulster DA’s Office has a fully informed perspective about what happened in a Super 8 Motel Room on the morning of Thursday, Nov. 9, 2023. We do know someone died in that room, and that someone’s been charged with assisting that person to take their own life.

While more information came to light on Tuesday, we expect to learn more about the circumstances behind this event in the days to come. It’s not the first time this has happened in Ulster County, or Kingston. There’s also a political angle, as Kingston’s former assemblyman had an impact on legal assisted suicide’s legislative path. But however this case turns out, it raises the larger, ever-insistent question: Is it time for Right to Die legislation in New York State? If not, why not? Put another way, whose life is it, anyway?

The last time someone was accused of assisted suicide in Kingston was almost 10 years ago. On the morning of Monday, Jan. 12, 2015, police were asked by a worried relative to check in on a couple who lived on West Chestnut Street. They got there in almost the nick of time — Paul Egan and his wife Catherine were in the process of carrying through on their suicide pact brought on, prosecutors would later say, by depression and other medical issues. The couple, police said, stuffed clothing in a furnace ventilation duct, allowing deadly carbon monoxide fumes to permeate throughout the house.

Officers almost got there in the nick of time: Paul survived, but Catherine died a few days later. Now a widower (which was not what he intended at all), Paul was charged with felony manslaughter, the same thing octogenarian Arizonan Stephen P. Miller was charged with. Your editorial team has no idea what might be going through the head of an 85-year-old person who’s facing a prison term, but he might take some comfort from how Paul Egan’s case turned out: the charge was reduced to a less-serious felony (promoting a suicide) and, following his guilty plea, he was sentenced to five years’ probation.

There are 10 states and one district in which helping someone else to die is legal. They are Oregon, Washington, Montana, Vermont, California, Colorado, Washington D.C., Hawaii, New Jersey, Maine and New Mexico. Seeing New Jersey on the list did make us wonder why this didn’t take place there — Mahwah is only an hour from Kingston, an astute reader noted — but it turns out only Vermont legally allows non-residents to participate in an assisted suicide. (Oregon no longer enforces its residency law and is seeking to have it repealed.)

Many in New York, including former governor Andrew Cuomo, want us to join that list, but it has yet to happen. Bearing some responsibility for that is Kevin Cahill, who consistently, and seemingly not unreasonably, called for the state Department of Health to perform and issue a study on the matter before the legislature took a vote on it. “While advocates are convinced that the issues surrounding this truly life-and-death matter have been sufficiently vetted, I disagree,” he told the Freeman back in 2019.

On the other side was then-state senator and now-County Executive Jen Metzger. “From my perspective, terminally ill adults should have the option of medication to alleviate suffering and enable a peaceful, humane death,” she also told the Freeman.

Last year, the New York Medical Aid in Dying Act was introduced for the eighth consecutive year. It remains, pardon the pun, buried [or stuck, if the pun is in bad taste] in both the Senate’s and Assembly’s respective Health Committees.

There are strong arguments, and feelings, on both sides of the issue. A member of the Editorial Team was last week faced with what is both a very common and very heartbreaking decision: whether to euthanize a very sick pet. In those grim and sad minutes waiting in the vet’s exam room waiting for a test to come in, it did occur to him to ask in his head why we don’t allow our fellow human beings to have the same kind of controlled release from pain that we provide — and see as a moral imperative — for the animals we love? In this case, the test made it clear that “getting better” wasn’t in the cards, so that member and his wife made what was undeniably the kinder choice.

And there is the whole “having agency over your own life” thing. No one’s calling for “Soylent Green”-like voluntary suicide parlors, or "thanatoria," where people would go in, watch a really cool movie in IMAX and die after ingesting a drink. (The world is pretty bad these days, but it isn’t that bad.) We won’t spoil what happens to the bodies.

But we’re a free people, right? When faced with nothing but excruciating pain for however much longer it may take, should we not have the freedom to go in a controlled and dignified way?

But then there’s the other side. A lot of opposition to legal assisted suicide is religious: Many faiths hold that human life is a gift from God, and that human death should be left to God’s will. To pre-empt that will, religions argue, is a grievous sin. In the Roman Catholic church, it used to be that people who killed themselves couldn’t get a church funeral and couldn’t be buried in consecrated ground. It’s only been a little over 30 years since Pope John Paul II softened that stance; traditions passed on by countless generations are hard to change. And there is always the possibility legal assisted suicide might be used by a truly evil individual to try to literally get away with murder.

And there's this perspective. While researching the topic, your Editorial Team came across an op-ed and appearing in the newspapers which are now Hudson Valley One written by Kristen Hanson, the wife of the late county budget director JJ Hanson, who died in 2017 after a battle with brain cancer. She had this to say on the topic: “JJ outlived his prognosis by three years, three months and 18 days. His motto became, ‘Every Day is a Gift’ — and it truly was. During those three years our son created priceless memories with JJ and we welcomed a second son into the world. We would have missed out on so much if JJ had been offered — and had accepted — assisted suicide.”

It's a difficult question, to be sure. The events of Nov. 9, 2023 at a motel in Kingston has brought it back to the top of our minds. We don’t have a definite answer, but your Editorial Team has always stuck up for the rights of individuals to follow their own conscience and make their own decisions. The way things are now, the law thwarts those rights for the terminally ill of our state. We think that needs to change.

If you or someone you know is struggling with mental health issues, call or text 988 or chat 988lifeline.org