If anyone can be said to have lived a long and fruitful life, it is Brooke Astor. Thrice married, the heir to an enormous fortune, and the energetic steward of a vast charitable trust that she enjoyed managing herself, she became that most rare creature, a rich person worth emulating.

A natural aristocrat who treated everyone she met with charm and grace, she was the perfect and natural first lady of New York, because, notwithstanding the privilege that smoothed her way, she lived a real life punctuated by her fair share of hardship and hard work. Her first husband, John Dryden Kuser, was such a drunken brute that once, when she was six months pregnant, he swung at her and broke her jaw. Like thousands of others in those days, she was obliged to trek to Reno to dissolve the marriage.

Her last husband, Vincent Astor, whom she described as “vulnerable, cranky, manly” and who left her $67 million, urged her to dispense the further $67 million he left in the trust which bore his name with the words, “Oh, Pookie, you’re going to have such a hell of a lot of fun with the foundation when I am gone.” And fun is exactly what she had for the next 40 or so years, sifting through the mountains of applications from needy causes and visiting the New Yorkers she was helping.

Like a true patrician, she kept an eye out for the little people. Along with generous gifts to the Metropolitan Museum, for instance, she also provided a million-dollar fund to throw an annual holiday party for the museum’s 2,000 employees — in perpetuity.

Yet it was discovered last year that in her final days Mrs. Astor’s life had deteriorated to the point where none of her fortune, nor her vast army of friends, nor her staff, nor her family, could save her from the incapacitating indignities of old age. Bette Davis once said, “Old age isn’t for sissies,” but there is little even the toughest of old ladies can do to counter the onset of incontinence and dementia.

Brooke Astor’s last years were tragic, not only for her but for her family, torn apart by accusation and counter-accusation about whether enough was being done to leaven her wretched condition. It has often been said that money can’t buy you love. Nor, it seems, can it buy you comfort in the sunset of life. There was a common unstated thought that rippled through those who read of this great lady’s tragedy: If even Brooke Astor can find herself in such a poor state, what chance that the rest of us will be spared the horrors of our own slow demise. Homo sapiens, it seems, is the victim of its own success. The more we have strived for immortality, the more it is certain that mortality will have the last laugh. This is not a matter of reforming Social Security. However much money is made available for pensions and long-term care, the fact remains that the science of extending life has been so successful that it has far outstripped our capacity for enjoying that life to the very end.

Although we may care not to acknowledge it, for many the circumstances of death already amounts to controlled euthanasia, as the medicine needed to prompt a sluggish heart gradually poisons the body. The doctors who tend those who have reached such a near terminal state must decide, often in concert with distraught relatives, whether repeated resuscitation is worthwhile, or whether the quality of the remaining life is so poor that it is not worth preserving.

There is no easy solution to this doctors’ dilemma. Twenty-one states have considered some form of legalizing assisted suicide and each has rejected the various proposals. In California, which prides itself on leading the country on such sensitive issues, the assembly has rejected assisted suicide laws five times. Even those lawmakers who can circumnavigate the profound ethical arguments surrounding the sanctity of life have failed to conceive of a system that would ensure that only those who genuinely wish to die are offered the means to end their own life.

The chief opponents of euthanasia laws are the Roman Catholic Church, which still holds dear to the Sixth Commandment, and, perhaps surprisingly, disability rights groups whose knowledge and understanding of decisions taken by medical staff on their behalf but often without their consent have led to distrust in any system that might allow others to decide what is best for a terminal patient.

They suspect that profit pressed HMOs might economize by deliberately reducing necessary medication or skimp on pain reduction to prompt the severely disabled or terminally ill to opt for suicide. The high cost of long-term care already presses upon those whose lives are being so expensively preserved and who worry for their families who must bear the financial burden.

Among the many glamorous friends of Brooke Astor and her second husband Buddie Marshall were Cole and Linda Porter. The two couples used to meet in Porter’s Paris home on the Rue Monsieur, where, no doubt, Cole would serenade Brooke on the piano with her favorite Porter song, “Just One of Those Things.” More poignant, however, would have been another Porter standard, with its telling refrain, “Got no diamonds, got no wealth. I got no men, but I got my health.”