I know when it's time to leave and I do not find it scary." I think of dying as a final adventure with a predictably abrupt end. "Each of us is born uniquely and dies uniquely.
"All I lose is an indefinite number of years of being a vegetable in a hospital setting, eating up the country's money but having not the faintest idea of who I am. "Understand that I am giving up nothing that I want by committing suicide," she said in her farewell note. She did not relish the prospect of being committed to a medical institution when her husband was no longer able to care for her. She was already forgetting the most basic of things: where she kept the coffee where the backspace tab on her computer was the name of the book she was reading. Bennett, 85, a brilliant psychotherapist, was aware that there would soon come a time when she was no longer competent to guide her own affairs and she wanted out before that day arrived. "Ever so gradually at first," she continued, "much faster now, I am turning into a vegetable." Bennett's mind was being ravaged by the effects of dementia – a "stealthy, stubborn and oh-so reliable disease," she wrote in a note composed over the past couple of years. She was gone but not before leaving us a clear-minded explanation as to why she decided to take her own life. He returned two minutes later to find his wife in a peaceful repose. Unhappy with the stool he was sitting on, he left briefly to find one more comfortable.
Jonathan, her husband of 57 years, helped her lie down. She downed a lethal dose of barbiturates and chased it with a shot of whisky. Bennett dragged a mattress out to a favourite spot near her hilltop home on B.C.'s Bowen Island. It is a suicide note that should be read by everyone, especially those who remain uncomfortable talking about a person's right to die with dignity. When you read the letter that Gillian Bennett left us, you are struck by its abundant clarity of thought and its total lack of self-pity.
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