A person can be killed instantly through many different means. Gunshots to the brain, being crushed by immense weight, being crushed by smaller weights moving at high speeds, high speed collisions with hard surfaces.
As we know it, to be killed painlessly, is to be killed instantly.
If you instantly destroy a person’s entire brain then they died without pain.
Yet the most effective ways of instantly destroying someone’s entire brain are considered ihumane.
Like letting someone die of an untreatable disease but giving them so many pain meds they can’t feel anything is “humane” but shooting them in the brainstem or destroying the entire brain isn’t.
If instantly killing someone by smashing their head with a massive rock, or shooting them in the brain stem is inhumane, then humans only consider it “humane” if it doesn’t leave a mess.
Obviously I’ve left out a lot of different ways to die, be they slowly or instantaneous, but that list is massive.
But I’d much rather die messily yet painlessly than painfully yet “pretty”
I think about this a lot, mostly in relation to Dr. assisted suicide or ways to make your inevitable end not quite as bad. And I know some will say, you’re going to be dead anyways, but I say my kitty suffer and suffocate for 10 minutes before she died and I would do anything to take that pain from her. This happened years ago and I still have real bad PTSD. Not only did she suffer immensely unnecessarily, but I am too.
A clean painless death is not just for the one dying, it’s about dignity and minimizing undue suffering for all involved.