There’s an article in a recent New Yorker about the various medical dilemmas the medical establishment faces when treating a person at the end of their life. Do you do everything you can to keep them alive for as long as possible, replacing their biological functionality with machines? Or can you try and grant the patient some dignity by letting them die at home, without extraordinary measures? Or can you, as the article insinuates, try to meld both approaches?

My feeling is that most death, whether prolonged or not, is undignified and often quite painful. Whether you die because the machine that’s been pumping air into your lungs can’t keep up with your other failing organs or a more natural death — essentially starvation or suffocation — it’s going to suck. That’s why I’ve always advocated for out and out euthanasia. People should have some mechanical monitor placed in their head that keeps tabs on their mental function, pain levels and muscular ability. When this drops below a certain level, a device placed in the brainstem should activate, causing a deluge of microwaves to fire and instantly cook the brain.

There’s only one downside to this: as we know from watching the remake of “The Last House on the Left,” microwaving a person’s head causes it to explode. So it is possible a person could be having a sensitive conversation with their niece about the meaning of life, only to have their head and brain matter splatter all over the family. It is also possible that if a family dog or cat is there, this pet might immediately start eating the tasty fried brains now splattered all over the place. But this is only a small downside to what I feel is a otherwise quite elegant solution to an issue that has plagued mankind since the beginning.