Peggy Sutherland was diagnosed with lung cancer in the mid-1980s, had it treated and the treatment worked. The cancer came back in 1999, but it did not kill her. Rather, Ms. Sutherland killed herself -- something that is legal under Oregon's Death With Dignity Act.

"She wanted to have control. She didn't want to cede that to her doctors or her children," said her daughter, Julie McMurchie.

Ms. Sutherland had moved from Pennsylvania after university, in large part to escape the formality and stuffiness of the Northeast. "She felt much freer living in Oregon."

Ms. McMurchie said her mother had treatment, surgery and tremendous pain through it all.

"I tried to encourage her to come live with me, but she didn't want to lose her independence or be a burden to us. She didn't even want to talk about it."

For Ms. Sutherland, access to good medical care was not an issue. Two of her children were doctors and their spouses were doctors, too. But one day the pain was too great to get out of bed.

She was sent to the hospital, where the only goal was to stabilize her pain enough that she could get to the home of a friend on the Oregon coast where she hoped to spend her last days. She never got there.

She was released from hospital in January, 2001, and once home told her daughter: "Call my doctor. I want to use the death with dignity law."

"The morning my mom died she had her five children and their spouses and her internist and her remaining sister from Pennsylvania around her. It was a beautiful morning.

"She wanted the 23rd Psalm read. We're not a very religious family. But for some reason she thought she would get some peace from hearing it.

"So my brother's wife starts reading and my mother says, 'That's not the right version, I want the King James Version.' That was so my mother.

"The last thing she saw was all of her children and the last thing she felt was all of our hugs and our kisses. She drank the medication. She was asleep in five minutes and died 20 minutes later." She was 68.

When asked how she voted in the 1997 referendum that legalized physician-assisted suicide, Ms. McMurchie said: "Here's the crazy thing. I don't remember how I voted. I don't remember talking about it. My mom was the first person close to me who died.

"I don't understand how people think they can tell someone else they have to suffer when the end result is the same.

"My mom fought her cancer, and she embraced life every day. She never laid around and said poor me. She lived every day until there wasn't anymore to live.

"She had lost control of her bodily functions. There were tumours growing in airways. She was going to slowly suffocate to death. Why on earth would I tell her that she couldn't take her own life?"