In November, Don Poore turned to his wife Dreana to ask a desperate question.
"Indiana doesn't have assisted suicide," he said. "What am I to do?"
For months, Poore suffered from intense back pain that only got worse.
On Aug. 28, he was diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer. The large tumor in his lung was pressing against his spine. It spread to his lymph nodes and brain, doctors said. Several rounds of radiation and one chemotherapy treatment didn't ease the pain.
"He was in excruciating pain, and on very strong opioids and morphine," his wife said. "He wanted to commit suicide but was afraid if he overdosed on the painkillers it might not work."
His suffering ended naturally earlier this month. Poore died Jan. 6. He was 65.
Dreana Poore said her husband had never heard of the "Death with Dignity" legislation that was recently introduced to the Indiana General Assembly.
The bill "allows individuals with a terminal illness who meet certain requirements to make a written request to an attending physician for medication that the individual may self-administer to end the individual's life," according to its author, State Rep. Matt Pierce, D-Bloomington, a Newton County native.
"My goal for this year is to begin a conversation between legislators and their constituents," Pierce told me. "Major policy changes like this one often take several years to get passed into law."
I don't expect our conservative-minded state legislators to vote this bill into law this year. The General Assembly session ends March 14, making it difficult to even get the bill into a hearing schedule. It currently is assigned to the House Courts and Criminal Code Committee, where it is pending.
My fear is that the bill will die without receiving a proper and thorough discussion by lawmakers and Hoosier residents.
"National polls show strong support for giving terminally ill patients a death with dignity option," Pierce said. "However, legislators will be reluctant to engage this controversial issue unless they get a strong message from the people they represent."
This is why I'm writing about the issue. I'm strongly in favor of such legislation, which was designed after an Oregon law in place for 20 years. Similar doctor-assisted dying is also available to residents of the District of Columbia, Vermont, Colorado, Montana, California and Washington.
"Many believe that doctor-assisted dying is tantamount to suicide. But my situation is unlike that of a healthy person who kills himself," wrote Carrol Krause, a home and garden columnist for the Bloomington Herald-Times on Nov. 3, 2015.
Krause became an outspoken advocate for Death with Dignity legislation as she fought terminal ovarian cancer.
"I do not end a healthy life filled with promise," she wrote. "Instead, I seek to hasten the inevitable and painful death that looms on my horizon."
Pierce said his constituents prompted him to introduce end-of-life legislation after reading Krause's columns and deeply personal blog posts on this topic.
The bill comes with more questions than answers at this point, exactly as it should be with such legislation.
One of those questions is whether such an assisted death would be legally labeled as a suicide. Pierce replied, "The bill requires the death certificate to list the cause of death as the underlying terminal disease, not suicide."
The bill specifies requirements a physician must meet in order to prescribe the medication to a patient. And it prohibits insurance companies from denying a life insurance payment under a suicide clause when someone uses the end-of-life option process provided in the bill, Pierce said.
The majority of my social media readers are in favor of this bill. A spirited discussion with more than 200 comments can be found on my Facebook page alone. Those readers asked dozens of excellent questions, exactly as I had hoped.
They asked how Christian religion fits into this end-of-life, doctor-assisted process. They asked why we, as a society, are more humane to dying dogs and cats than we are to dying humans. And they asked why Indiana is always so behind other more progressive states. (I've written several columns on this issue alone through the years.)
Other readers insisted that a "God-given life" should be lived from the moment of conception to the moment of natural death, with no medicinal meddling from mankind.
"The moment we play God is very, very dangerous," one woman told me.
"If being pro-life means that God decides when you live and die, then you have absolutely no business seeing a doctor even once in your life," another reader countered.
Also, our state already allows for advanced care directives, and this bill would be a logical extension of this medical process, other readers noted.
Readers also wondered what happens if a terminally ill person changes his or her mind about an assisted death as the process goes along. There are several checks and balances in the bill to address this possibility, an issue those other states have addressed in detail.
According to the bill, a dying patient would be required to administer any death-inducing medication, not anyone else, which could otherwise result in a Level 1 felony, according to the bill's legal definition.
Don Poore would have certainly pursued such an end-of-life option if it was legal in Indiana, his wife said.
I respect the religious principles of believers, but I don't agree that their beliefs should dictate or influence our state's laws. This includes end-of-life legislation.
I'll let Krause, who died Jan. 29, 2016, have the final words.
"It's too late to save me from a horrible fate," she wrote in her column. "But it's not too late to save your beloved parent, sibling, child or friend from unnecessary suffering. Contact your legislators and request death with dignity in Indiana."