The drought and plunging water table wasn’t the only big news in California last week, where I was visiting my son and his family.

The California state Senate has just approved a bill to allow mentally competent patients with less than six months to live to end their lives with physician-prescribed drugs. If the bill becomes law, California will become the sixth state to legalize physician-assisted suicide for the terminally ill.

I was fascinated by the debate, as reported in the Los Angeles Times. A 29-year-old California woman had recently moved to Oregon, where physician-assisted suicide for dying patients is legal, “rather than suffer pain and debilitation from an aggressive brain cancer.” Before her death, she had video-taped an emotional appeal to the California legislature to allow others in the state a choice denied to her.

A member of the state Senate spoke to her colleagues of her mother’s recent “brutal” death from brain cancer and said the bill would allow the terminally ill “to voluntarily end their lives in peace.”

Another Senator, however, found the bill “unconscionable” and another said he had once considered suicide when he was disabled---temporarily as it turned out. He also said that when his mother was diagnosed with cancer, she “was given weeks, but lived for years.” Another opponent said physicians should kill pain, not patients.

Supporters of the legislation say it includes safeguards. Two doctors would have to concur that a patient has less than six months to live, and the patient would have to request a lethal prescription twice, with 15 days elapsing between the two requests. The medication would have to be self-administered. Coercing a patient to request assisted suicide would be a felony.

It’s by no means certain that the bill will become law in California. The lower house of the legislature may not concur with the Senate, and Governor Brown hasn’t disclosed his intentions should the bill reach his desk. Brown once studied for the Roman Catholic priesthood, which regards suicide under any circumstances as a grievous sin.

The moral and philosophical aspects of this debate are perplexing. Anyone who says they’re not perplexing probably had his mind made up before listening to both sides.

What is death exactly? And more importantly, what is life? People today fight over the definitions of these terms. I believe that to live is to be engaged with God and the wider world and to be able to provide or do something of value, however small.

(Abortion is a related issue, of course. A fetus cannot engage with God and the world or contribute anything of value---though the potentiality for the future is there. That debate is perplexing, too.)

I hope to die at the “right” time, that is, when I can no longer be engaged with God and the world or contribute something to someone. When that time comes, if I am not of sound mind, I want my family and my doctors to allow me to die.

But what about helping me to die, perhaps sooner than I might otherwise have died? I’m not sure how I feel about that. How could anyone be sure until faced with a terminal diagnosis attended by severe pain and debilitation?

I do know that I don’t want costly medicines and procedures used to keep my heart pumping and my lungs inflating just so that I can continue to take up space in this world, when that money could be used to educate, feed, house, and otherwise care for others, including my heirs.

Nor do I want to live so long that my family must devote time and energy attending to me, even if they’re motivated by love for me, when they could and should be attending to other things.

Alabama is a more conservative state than California, so it may be a long time before a bill like this is introduced into our legislature. Perhaps it will never be. But it’s always helpful to ponder the meaning and purpose of our lives and to ask what enhances it and what cheapens it. The truth is probably less obvious than we think.

Richard H. Schmidt is a retired Episcopal priest, editor and author who lives in Fairhope. He can be reached at courier@gulfcoastnewspapers.com.