British broadcast journalist, Ray Gosling, has reignited the debate over mercy killing when he confessed, in a television program, to having once killed a lover who was hospitalized with AIDS. He suffocated his lover with a pillow to honor a pact he had made with a man who he said was in "terrible, terrible pain." The case is now being investigated and Mr. Gosling could face up to 14 years in prison should he be charged and convicted of a crime. It was slightly more than 14 years ago that one of my closest friends died a horrific death from AIDS. He had been diagnosed with HIV early in the epidemic and we talked often about what might lay ahead for him. In the absence of medications which could control the virus, my friend was grateful for anti-depressants, pain killers and eventually morphine. We also had a single conversation about one other option. My friend was a religious man and it somewhat surprised me when, over coffee one morning, he told me that he didn't think it was a sin – when pain became too much to bear and when there was no hope of survival – to have assistance to die. Of course a doctor couldn't do it, he said, but a friend could. My friend never directly asked me to help him die. I don't remember now if I told him that this was something I couldn't do or if I just knew – a deep in your soul kind of knowledge – that I wouldn't be able to do it. The subject was changed and was never discussed again. A few months later my friend's partner called and said I should come to the hospital. My friend was emaciated, was going blind, could no longer speak, had an infection in his brain, was slipping in and out of consciousness and was in pain that was sometimes difficult to control. I relieved the partner at the hospital and was alone with my dying friend for hours. The medical staff rarely entered his room. Someone dying of AIDS in a New York hospital in the mid 1990s just didn't get that much attention. There were too many cases like his. The longer I sat at my friend's bedside, the more my certainty about mercy killing wavered. In some ways it would be easy to do what Mr. Gosling now claims to have done – to take a pillow and suffocate my friend. Just a few minutes and it would be over. I thought about possible criminal charges, but sensed that even if the hospital had suspicions; they wouldn't investigate my friend's death since at this point the outcome was inevitable. I believe that my friend would have welcomed the end of his suffering. But in the end, I couldn't do it. I wasn't with my friend when he died a few days later. To the best of my knowledge he died unassisted. Today, I am more certain than ever that I am incapable of performing a mercy killing. And I am more certain than ever that there are cases, like my friend's, that warrant assisted suicide. I could not do for my friend what Mr. Gosling did for his lover, but I can certainly understand it. If Mr. Gosling is charged with a crime, his jury should be made up of people who have sat at the bedside of dying loved ones, wishing they had the strength to end the suffering.