Healthy 75-Year-Old Ends Her Life So She Won’t Grow Old
Newser – A British nurse with no serious health issues has ended her life at a suicide clinic because, she said, she didn’t want to grow old. Gill Pharaoh, 75, said her work in a nursing home revealed the “awful” reality of old age and burdens placed on loved ones and caregivers, the Telegraph reports. “I know that I have gone just over the hill now,” she said before going to the Lifecircle clinic in Basel, Switzerland. “It is not going to start getting better. I do not want people to remember me as a sort of old lady hobbling up the road with a trolley. … All you need to do, at my age, is break a hip and you are likely to go very much downhill from that.” Pharaoh says she wasn’t depressed, and only had relatively minor health issues like tinnitus and occasional back pain from shingles.
She spent a last evening in Basel with her life partner John that he describes as “tranquil and enjoyable. … Gill had been thinking about it for years and I had no intention of spoiling it by getting emotional and heavy.” Her daughter Caron, also a nurse, admits the decision was hard on her, but Pharaohwrote in a blog that she had to leave on a good note: “I want people to remember me as I am now—a bit worn around the edges and not quite at my peak, but still recognizably me!” She concedes that “people will have different reactions to my choice,” but asks that lawmakers “listen to, and respect, the views of people like me, and I am not alone in holding this view.” Indeed, a study shows that 611 people went to Switzerland between 2008 and 2012 to medically end their lives.
I thought 60 was old?
If someone over 60 wants out, I’m not stopping them. Better than trying to kill yourself and messing it up.
She said she wasn’t depressed? She bitched the entire time she was alive! What a joy she must have been. lol
Oh Lord. She was a nurse? They better check back into her records and make sure miss sunshine didn’t kill anybody else.
I cared for my mother as she declined with Alzheimer’s over a 5-year period. Even at the last, she still was a human being, made in the image of God and worthy of love, honor and respect. I am a better person for having cared for her. If we make it socially acceptable for seniors to terminate early, it will all too quickly devolve into what we have seen with PP: filthy vultures preying on the weak and frail at a vulnerable time in their life. Or it could develop that what is now voluntary may be aided by a governmental push into self-termination.
reading that it seems she is very selfish. It was all about her. What she wanted, concerned about what people thought about her, her feelings. Makes sense.
I don’t give a shit, she was an adult and therefore should be allowed to make her own decision, right?
the babies at pp had no choice did they?
when the adults no longer have a choice then I will care about the adults but until then it’s the babies being slaughtered by my government that bothers me to no end.
if we can’t stop the government sanctioned slaughter of babies now, then when they get around to slaughtering the adults who they deem unworthy of life we will have no recourse left to us.
Good riddance. The world will be just a little better off with one less narcissist
I can’t believe the comments on here about she’s an adult and she could be euthanized if she wants to.
The whole point of this story is the slippery slope it puts all of us on. Allowing a healthy person to be willingly euthanized is not many steps away from forcing anyone over a certain age, or with a certain (read expensive) medical condition to be euthanized.
I say fight to the end.
Soylant Green. . . .
‘Nuff said.
Dave, you are a good man. I did the same for mom and dad during the last 10 years of their lives. They both passed at home and the Lord’s presence was there.
I have a brother and sister who finally made it after dad died, to get what they could. My brother’s wife went through mom and dad’s house, picking out what she wanted before my dad died. My dad was buried on a Tuesday, and my brother was here that same Friday, loading his truck up with things.