In Love: A Memoir of Love and Loss(11)
Dignitas Dignitas in 2020 has served more than three thousand people and has a rival, a competing organization, Pegasos, created by the brother of a doctor who left Dignitas. So now there are two places, in the entire world, where you can go to end your life painlessly if you are not suicidal, psychotic, or advanced in your dementia, and I’m glad of it, although my heart is with Dignitas, who treated us with sensible kindness, as much as possible.
For Dignitas (“Life with dignity, death with dignity”), the prerequisites for accompanied suicide are: old age (there have been quite a few folks in their nineties, who were not in pain but very, very tired), terminal illness (your inevitable death could still be ten years away—not acceptable in America; acceptable to the Swiss), or an “unendurable incapacitating disability” or “unbearable and uncontrollable pain.” Dignitas, founded in 1998 by Ludwig Minelli, a lawyer and the former general secretary for the European Convention on Human Rights, is occasionally accused of malfeasance (SWISS DROP DIGNITAS PROBE OVER URNS IN LAKE, The Seattle Times, 2010; CASHING IN ON DESPAIR? SUICIDE CLINIC DIGNITAS IS A PROFIT-OBSESSED KILLING MACHINE, CLAIMS EX-WORKER, Daily Mail, 2009), but it has run pretty smoothly for these twenty-two years. Occasionally, Dignitas has had to move facilities, from a flat, where the neighbors objected, to Mr. Minelli’s own home in Maur, where his neighbors also objected, to another apartment in Zurich, quite close to a brothel, which objected for obvious reasons, then to a bowling-ball factory, and now to an industrial park in the suburbs of Zurich. Ludwig Minelli, at eighty-eight, still seems to be running things. (Sandra Martino’s name has popped up a couple of times; she is the chairwoman in Germany, where Dignitas hopes to open an office in the coming year, due to a federal-court ruling that the ban on assisted suicide in Germany is unconstitutional.) Pegasos is quite similar to Dignitas and, in fact, is related. Dr. Erika Preisig worked for Dignitas from 2006 to 2008. She went on in 2011 to co-found Lifecircle, an organization active in supporting policy change around assisted suicide and providing counseling and support.
For more or less the same fee as Dignitas, with more or less the same application process, although with the addition of a second doctor interviewing you once in Switzerland, Pegasos provides the same accompanied suicide that Dignitas does, but the barbiturate can be injected intravenously (self-administered by turning a knob or pressing a button) or drunk, and the death is recorded on video. Dr. Erika Preisig and her brother, Ruedi Habegger, co-founded Lifecircle, but you can’t find it anymore because in 2019, Dr. Preisig was fined twenty thousand dollars and sentenced to fifteen months in prison (suspended sentence) after a wrongful-death suit was successfully filed against her—for mishandling the barbiturate involved in the assisted suicide of a depressed sixty-year-old woman. The court found that this woman had the discernment to choose to end her life but that Dr. Preisig had mishandled (which I think meant handled) the sodium pentobarbital in assisting her. So, Dr. Preisig disappears and her brother opens Pegasos. Pegasos defines itself mostly as better than Dignitas: Less red tape! Urgent situations can be addressed in weeks, not months! English is the first language for the volunteers! You can bring your dog! No membership fees!
In English big-city newspapers (MY WIFE ENDED HER LIFE AT DIGNITAS, The Guardian; I’M ANGRY THAT DAD HAD TO DIE AT DIGNITAS SO FAR FROM HOME, Daily Mail), there are multiple articles every year about a husband or wife or children taking someone they love to Dignitas. It’s usually a first-person account of the anxious plane ride (and in England, they usually keep it even more quiet than Brian and I will, because the police have been known to come to the house as soon as the grieving family returns and announce that charges are pending) and then the drive to the little blue apartment building, which some people call the Blue Oasis, in the industrial outskirts of the suburbs of Zurich. The articles sometimes end before the person drinks the anti-emetic, and sometimes an article goes on to describe the very end and the return home.
Wednesday Continued, January 29, 2020, Zurich
Dr. G. knocks on the door in the morning and begins by saying that it will be a short meeting. He asks Brian twice if he has changed his mind and Brian says no. He and Brian talk about their shared love of the Dalai Lama and they each get to tell their story about being a young man and meeting His Holiness. They are pleased with each other. I wipe my tears on my sleeve. Dr. G. asks Brian a few questions to make sure that Brian knows where he is (Zurich), why he’s here (to have an accompanied suicide at Dignitas), and what will happen (have a chocolate, sign some papers, drink something so he won’t vomit, and drink the drink, is what he says). Brian answers just right and it is one of those moments when the fact that he answers correctly makes me think, Are we doing this too soon? Should we come back in six months? After Dr. G. leaves, and I cry some more and Brian is dry-eyed, I can see how far away he already is. His little boat is far offshore now.
We go out to dinner and eat not-bad Italian food and Brian orders with none of his brio. He doesn’t look at the waiter. Brian knocks over my glass of wine and the waiter puts six cloth napkins on our little table and Brian sits calmly while the mopping up occurs and another waiter kneels beside me to clean up the broken glass. I’m sure we speak but only about the food and the weather. We walk down a few side streets, through the mist, and circle around to our hotel. As he has every night, Brian asks if we can go for a stroll and I say yes, because how can I say no. It is cold and dark and slippery and I imagine that Brian feels as alone as I do but I can tell he isn’t as afraid.