Exclusive from The Life and Times of Hollywood by Richard A. Lertzman- (Los Angeles)- Mary Tyler Moore, who passed away on January 25, 2017, had made a decision that she wanted to die with dignity – just like her terminally ill brother, who tried to commit suicide 24 years ago.

There was no secret that Mary, who was a Type 1 Diabetic, had suffered her last years. At her last appearance at an awards show, she had to be led on stage as she was nearly blind, could hardly walk and was recovering from brain surgery.

Moore was a recovered alcoholic, and had been diagnosed with Type I diabetes in 1969, after having a miscarriage. In 2011, she had surgery to remove a meningioma, a benign brain tumor. In 2014, friends reported that she had heart and kidney problems and was nearly blind.

Moore died at the age of 80 on January 25, 2017, at Greenwich Hospital in Greenwich, Connecticut “officially” from cardiopulmonary arrest complicated by pneumonia after having been placed on a respirator the previous week. She was interred in Oak Lawn Cemetery, in Fairfield, Connecticut, during a private ceremony.

However, several of her closest friends suggest that her death was accelerated by the use  of a “comfortable suicide”
Her close friend told TLATOH that, “Mary’s life would end not with a bang, but with the drip, drip, drip of an IV drug that put her into a slumber from which she would never awaken. That drug, lorazepam, is a strong sedative. She was also receiving morphine, to kill pain. This combination can slow breathing and heart rate, and may make it impossible for the patient to eat or drink. In so doing, it can hasten death….”

“Mary’s was about at the end of her rope,” a family friend said. “Her once-steely will to fight the good fight, to overcome her myriad health woes, was fading fast. She’s ready to meet her maker.”

According to the New York Times story, “Hard Choice for a Comfortable Death: Sedation” (by ANEMONA HARTOCOLLIS – received what some doctors call palliative sedation and others less euphemistically call terminal sedation. While the national health coverage debate has been roiled by questions of whether the government should be paying for end-of-life counseling…in consultations with patients or their families, are routinely making tough decisions about the best way to die. Among those choices is terminal sedation, a treatment that is already widely used, even as it vexes families and a profession whose paramount rule is to do no harm. Doctors who perform it say it is based on carefully thought-out ethical principles in which the goal is never to end someone’s life, but only to make the patient more comfortable. But the possibility that the process might speed death has some experts contending that the practice is, in the words of one much-debated paper, a form of “slow euthanasia,” and that doctors who say otherwise are fooling themselves and their patients.

Mary’s husband was her former physician, Dr. Robert Levine.

Radar Online reported that Mary tried to help her 47-year-old brother, John Hackett Moore, find eternal peace when he was at the end of his cancer battle in 1991.
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As Mary revealed in her biography, “After All,” she and her brother attempted an assisted suicide: She laced ice cream with high-powered drugs in a desperate attempt to free John of his unbearable pain.

“He asked me to mash them [the pills] into ice cream, the only food his stomach could tolerate,” she wrote. “There wasn’t much to say, and when he extended his hand, I silently gave him the first batch of pills and water, which he took until he couldn’t stand the taste anymore.”

But her brother’s tolerance to the lethal cocktail was so high, he lived through the attempt. John would die three months later, surrounded by family in his hospital room.

Mary had not been seen in public since April 2013, when she was pictured in a wheelchair at Los Angeles International Airport.

Said the source: “Despite John’s failed attempt, Mary is steadfast that she did the right thing when she tried to put her brother out of his misery, and has been contemplating ending her own [life] this way.”

What’s more, as she lies on her deathbed, Mary is constantly dreaming of seeing her son, Richard Meeker, who died at age 24 in 1980.

“Every so often, Mary will say, ‘I’ll be with Richie soon,’” the source told Radar Online had  Richie lived, he would be turning 59 on July 3.

        Said the pal: “With summer here, Mary can’t help but think of her little boy’s birthday. If there was ever a time to take matters into her own hands, now is sadly that time.”