My respects and thanks go to the family of Dr John Elliott who allowed their story to be told.
Three articles from the Sydney Morning Herald:
My name is Dr. John Elliott and I’m about to die, with my head held high:
James Button
January 26, 2007
Article 1 of 3, each pertaining to the story of Dr John Elliott, an American living in Australia who went to Switzerland to die:
His wife holding one arm, his other hand leaning on a stick, he walks slowly across the hotel lobby. She is in tears, he is calm. His breathing is laboured but his eyes are bright. It is 8.30am on Thursday, and in an hour John Elliott expects to be dead.
“I’m squeezing your arm too tight, I’m sorry,” he says. She tells him not to worry.
It is minus 5 degrees outside in Zurich and she knots a white scarf around his neck. As he walks out the door he breathes and says faintly: “I’m free.”
The taxi drives a few blocks to a snowy, suburban street. In the ground-floor flat of a plain, four-storey building they meet a male nurse and a female social worker.
They sign documents. Dr Elliott, from Rose Bay in Sydney, takes a preparation to prevent vomiting. The nurse, Arthur, mixes a drink containing the barbiturate sodium pentobarbital and water.
As they wait 30 minutes for the anti-emetic to take effect they drink a cognac and chat. Arthur says he is from Davos, in the mountains. Oh, Dr Elliott says. He and Angelika used to go to the nearby village of Clavedel. They had so many happy days there.
With a video tape rolling, for legal purposes, Arthur asks Dr Elliott whether he realises that if he takes the drink he will die. Dr Elliott says he does.
“You can opt out at any time,” the nurse says, several times.
“No,” says Dr Elliott, an American-born doctor who never practised in Australia.
“I just want to get going. Hurry up.”
About 10.10, sitting in a chair, Angelika holding his hand, he drinks. “It’s not bitter at all,” he says, surprised.
He has another cognac. His wife hugs him for the last time in 34 years of marriage. He starts to look drowsy, then his head nods forward, like any person falling asleep. In 15 minutes he is dead.
Dr Elliott spent the last hour of his life as he spent his last three months, unflinchingly determined to die.
On Thursday the 79-year-old became the latest in a line of Australians – including Max Bell, Bob Dent, Janet Mills and Lisette Nigot – who have made their deaths public in the hope of forcing a change to Australian laws on euthanasia and assisted suicide.
“My name is John Elliott and I am a medical doctor from Sydney,” begins a statement he handed to the Herald two hours before his death.
“I am dying of multiple myeloma. Because of my illness I have come to Zurich in Switzerland to use the services of the dying-with-dignity organisation, Dignitas.
**footnote from Choice: Let’s also remember, Steve Guest and his brothers, of Victoria, who also made his death public that the Australian community continues to be informed of the downside of “living” with crippling disease. His story was perpetuated in the Australian SBS Documentary, Directed by Davor Dirlic “Do Not Resuscitate”.
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The last goodbye
January 26, 2007
John Elliott was in pain and wanted to end his life. He also wanted to make a statement about the choice to die and so invited James Button and photographer Kate Geraghty to document his final journey.
Other related coverage
* My name is Dr John Elliott and I’m about to die, with my head held high
* With wife and friends, doctor was not alone on extraordinary final journey
A flight from Bangkok has landed at Zurich airport, and in the arrivals hall travellers in bright holiday clothes are hugging loved ones, grinning and holding babies. In the midst of the happy scene an elderly man is wheeled through the door and into a taxi. John Elliott has not come home and is not on holiday. He has come to Switzerland for a different reason. Accompanied by his wife, Angelika, the 79-year-old Sydney man goes straight to a hotel.
A phone call is made to Dignitas, a Swiss organisation that helps seriously ill people commit suicide. Papers must be obtained, and a doctor must confirm that he is seriously ill and sound of mind before Elliott can get what he says he wants more than anything in life: the date of his death.
Elliott, a medical doctor, has multiple myeloma, or bone marrow cancer. A tumour in his back is pressing on his spine, causing him excruciating pain. An enlarged prostate presses on his bladder and can force him to urinate every 15 minutes. He has Sjogren’s syndrome, which dries the glands in the eyes and mouth, making swallowing difficult. He keeps an oxygen bottle by his bed as he says his occasional sleep apnea, which stops his breathing, could kill him. His hands shake, he struggles to walk. He says he hallucinates; at times he struggles to remember his thought. His hematologist, Sam Milliken, at Sydney’s St Vincent’s Hospital, writes that Elliott “may be entering the terminal phase of his disease”.
In 2000 the act of reaching for a phone on the wall collapsed a vertebra in Elliott’s back. Tests showed he was suffering from multiple myeloma, which among other effects makes bones brittle and liable to break.
His wife, 20 years younger, gave up her job running a Woollahra antique shop to care for him. After nearly seven years she is exhausted.
“We can’t go to a movie, or for a drive,” she says. “All the everyday nice things have gone. All I do is fill out prescriptions for a nurse. It is death, illness, drugs and suicide. My friends say, ‘Come over.’ I say, ‘I can’t.’ It’s a nightmare. I just want to have a normal life again.”
But it wasn’t until November, when the pain grew intolerable, that Elliott decided he could not go on. Milliken suggested his patient have radiotherapy to alleviate his pain. Elliott initially refused, wanting no more treatments, but agreed after realising that with it he might be well enough to travel to Switzerland.
Thinking it would be the last time he would be able to fly, the couple booked a flight to Zurich. They also bought tickets for the Darwin doctor and longtime euthanasia campaigner Philip Nitschke and his partner, Fiona Stewart, who had agreed to accompany the Elliotts.
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With wife and friends, doctor was not alone on extraordinary final journey
Fiona Stewart
January 26, 2007
Other related coverage
* My name is Dr John Elliott and I’m about to die, with my head held high
* The last goodbye
LIKE most 40-year-olds, I had never seen a dead body. That was until 10.30am on Thursday, when I was one of the honoured few to attend the legal, assisted suicide of the Sydney doctor John Elliott in Zurich, Switzerland.
On this January morning, John’s wife, Angelika, Dr Philip Nitschke and I watched as John sat peacefully in a chair in a bright sunny room, admiring the snow flurries outside. With the mandatory paperwork complete, I watched, too, as he drank a very small glass of the lethal barbiturate sodium pentobarbital.
In response, and as he wanted, we clinked our glasses of cognac in honour of this tall, proud man. John was asleep within minutes, dying shortly after.
A death such as this is what happens in a modern country such as Switzerland, where civilised laws are used every day to allow people to die with dignity. A death like this is what can happen when a terminally ill Australian makes an extraordinary last trip to the other side of the world.
Seriously ill with cancer of the bone marrow, John knew it was only by coming to Switzerland that he would have any say in when and how he died. He knew also that if he didn’t make the trip in late January it would be too late. He would be too frail to board a plane.
Worse than this, he would find no airline that would take him as a passenger. Airlines are never keen to take terminally ill patients on one-way trips halfway around the world.
As a doctor, John knew if this happened he would be stuck. Stuck in Sydney. Stuck in a hospice, high on morphine. Stuck with his life, death and freedom beyond his grasp.
And so in the weeks after Christmas I, like the others, rejigged my schedule to assure John of his final wish – to relieve his pain and suffering, and die peacefully in his wife’s arms.
Called an “accompaniment”, John’s visit to the Dignitas service was not without difficulties. When we left Australia he had no firm appointment. Dignitas told us it was booked until mid-February. Dying well, it seems, is big business and because Dignitas is the only place in the world where foreigners can be clients, its full program is understandable. Holland, Belgium and Oregon do not cater for non-residents when it comes to dying with dignity.
In this regard Switzerland’s laws are unique. Since the 1940s assisted suicide has been legal, as long as your motives in assisting are not “selfish”. This is why Switzerland is now seen as an exemplary modern civil society in an otherwise uncivil world; a world where we are living longer and suffering an increased array of diseases and conditions due to our longevity. And a world where our political institutions are increasingly swayed by the long arm of the church.
For reasons such as these, Dignitas appeared as the perfect option for non-believers like John and Angelika Elliott. The service was an ideal way to bring a close to John’s years of illness and suffering.
Fully supportive of his actions, Angelika nevertheless boarded the plane from Sydney with a heavy heart. She told me this was not the same man she married 35 years ago. She told me of John’s gradual deterioration, his anxiety about how death would come upon him and of his tears when Dignitas agreed to accept him as a client.
Angelika told me of her fear that in doing the right thing, in helping John go to Switzerland, she might run foul of the law. Having researched the Dignitas service, she was aware of the ordeal that a British woman, Win Crew, was subjected to when she accompanied her sick husband, Reg, to Zurich in 2003. Angelika knew Win had been threatened with being charged with Reg’s assisted suicide, because she helped him onto the plane, travelled with him and held his hand at the end. While she knew the charges against Win were never pursued, she is now wondering about the reception that awaits her when she returns home next week.
For that matter, will I find my own actions scrutinised by Australia’s police? Did I incite this man to take his life? Did I provide moral support by being present? That is the question posed by the 21 people who sat with Nancy Crick in 2002. That is the question the Queensland Government left unanswered.
In travelling to Switzerland with John, I hope my presence was supportive, not in encouraging John’s final exit, but in assuring him of the dignity of his choice.
In the last days of his life John spoke often of his scientific curiosity and the “a-ha!” factor. As in so much of his life, this fascinating, stimulating, challenging man wanted to know more, what life and death were really about. I hope his “a-ha!” moment was a good one.
Dr Fiona Stewart is the co-author, with Philip Nitschke, of The Peaceful Pill Handbook and executive officer of Exit International.