[ENGINESSQ]

I recall in one of Akira Kurosawa's films - an elderly mother telling her son that it was time for him to carry her up to the top of Ancestor Mountain and leave her there before impending winter made it impossible for him to do so...because she knew that it was her time to go. He was reluctant, but mother reminded him that it was his duty, and eventually he carried her up there and left her sitting there among the frozen skeletal corpses of the village's ancestors, all still sitting in the meditation pose among the trees.

In our death-denying culture, this is considered morbid, psychologically unstable, and criminal. If there is a historical basis for this in premodern Japan, it seems very sane to me.

When I was young, in northern Minnesota, in the winter it was common practice to open a window in the bedroom of those who were terminally ill to the point of coma, so that they would develop pneumonia (lung congestion) and die quickly. This was believed to be a kindness.