
 
 Josh Elliott, CTVNews.ca 
 
 
 
 
 
 A B.C. woman experiencing the early stages of dementia has killed herself and left behind an open letter advocating for assisted suicide. 
 
 Gillian Bennett, 83, said she didn't want to lose her "self" to dementia and leave behind an "empty husk" in a letter posted to her blog on Monday, shortly before she ended her life. "I will take my life today around noon," she wrote. "It is time. Dementia is taking its toll and I have nearly lost myself. I have nearly lost me." 
 
 Bennett was diagnosed with dementia three years ago. Her blog post says she opted to end her life now, before she lost her ability to act, because she could feel the disease quickly eroding her mind. "Ever so gradually at first, much faster now, I am turning into a vegetable," Bennett wrote. 
 
 She reportedly died at about 11:30 a.m. on Monday after ingesting a lethal drug. She spent her last moments laying on a foam mattress outside her Bowen Island home, with her husband at her side. 
 
 "I just sat there and held her hand," her husband Jonathan Bennett told CTV Vancouver. 
 
 Gillian Bennett said she wanted her death to spur the conversation around assisted suicide. "We do NOT talk much about how we die," she said. "Yet facing death is thoroughly interesting and absorbing and challenging." 
 
 Bennett pointed to law, religion and medicine as three institutions that need to change their approaches to assisted suicide. "My hope is that these institutions will continue to transform themselves, and that the medical profession will mandate, through sensitive and appropriate protocols, the administration of a lethal dose to end the suffering of a terminally ill patient, in accordance with her Living Will," she wrote. 
 
 Bennett said everyone by the age of 50 should have a living will that says how and under what circumstances they would like to die. "Legally, everyone should have an obligation to make a Will, which would be stored electronically, could not be destroyed, and would be available automatically to any hospital in the world," she wrote. "I do not have all the answers, but I do think I'm raising questions that need to be raised," she added. 
 
 In her blog post, Bennett said she didn't want to leave behind a "living carcass" that would be a financial burden on the Canadian healthcare system, and a chore for her loved ones. 
 
 "I can live or vegetate for perhaps 10 years in hospital at Canada's expense, costing anywhere from $50,000 to $75,000 per year," she wrote. "It is a ludicrous, wasteful affair." 
 
 Bennett claimed that rising life expectancy and an aging population make the elderly a growing burden on society – a burden to which she does not want to contribute. "All I lose is an indefinite number of years of being a vegetable in a hospital setting, eating up the country's money but not having the faintest idea of who I am," she wrote. 
 
 Bennett's husband and family were aware of her decision ahead of time, she said. "In our family it is recognized that any adult has the right to make her own decision," Bennett said. Her husband did not help her with the suicide but was present when she died, according to the blog post. 
 
 Bennett's son and daughter spent the weekend visiting with her before she died. 
 
 "She was just at complete peace," said her son, Guy. "My mom knew her window was closing. She knew that it was approaching the time when she could just wake up one morning and not remember her plan." 
 
 Gillian Bennett is survived by her husband, two children, six grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. 
 
 “I think of dying as a final adventure with a predictably abrupt end," Gillian Bennett said. "I know when it's time to leave and I do not find it scary." 
 
 With files from CTV Vancouver's Maria Weisgarber ||||| How do you feel about this issue? Comment on Facebook. 
 
 === 
 
 On Monday morning shortly before noon, Gillian Bennett dragged a foam mattress from her home on Bowen Island to one of her favourite spots on the grass, facing a craggy rock cliff, the place she had chosen to die. 
 
 Bennett, who was 85 and in the early stages of dementia, chose to take her own life with a draught of good whiskey, a dose of Nembutal mixed with water and her husband of 60 years by her side. 
 
 “I held her hand,” said Jonathan, a retired philosophy professor. His voice is reflective, resonant, measured. “I agreed with her choice.” 
 
 Before the shadows of dementia began to cloak her mind, Bennett created a website, Deadatnoon.com, to be made public after her death, on which she makes a passionate case for physician-assisted options for the terminally ill and elderly. 
 
 === 
 
 VIEW MORE PHOTOS HERE, or if you're using a mobile device, tap the story image and swipe. 
 
 === 
 
 Bennett was painfully aware of the encroaching dementia. “I am becoming a vegetable,” she wrote. 
 
 “Every day I lose bits of myself, and it’s obvious that I am heading towards the state that all dementia patients eventually get to: not knowing who I am and requiring full-time care.” 
 
 Bennett wanted to face death as she faced the challenges of her life: with intellectual curiosity, courage and grace. 
 
 She did not want to be a “carcass,” physically alive but “with no one inside.” 
 
 So she decided to end her life before her mind was totally gone. 
 
 “She wouldn’t let me help her, and I didn’t wish to,” said Jonathan. “I don’t know where she got the Nembutal or the instructions; she didn’t tell me.” 
 
 Nor did she let him help her drag the mattress outside, although that final effort was physically difficult for her. 
 
 One thing her husband does know for sure: “She was absolutely not frightened. Not even slightly. She was as calm and peaceful as you could imagine.” 
 
 After she passed away, Jonathan let go of her hand and called his wife’s doctor, who came and confirmed death and notified the RCMP. 
 
 An RCMP officer interviewed Jonathan and together they waited for the coroner. 
 
 “The policeman asked me what happened and I told him. He was very good. Efficient and civilized and good,” said Jonathan. 
 
 The officer’s respectful treatment was a small comfort. He and his wife knew that if anyone assisted her, they would be breaking the law. 
 
 “Gillian and I both disliked and disapproved of the laws making it impossible to help a loved one with something as important as death.” 
 
 His brilliant, beautiful wife — who once had a thriving clinical psychotherapy practice — had made the choice she felt was morally and ethically correct. 
 
 Dementia had crept in bit by bit. 
 
 Lately, Bennett became increasingly forgetful, hyperfocused on certain things, obsessing non-stop about others. 
 
 “She was failing more quickly in the last six months,” said her daughter Sara, “and she knew it.” 
 
 During lucid moments in the last two years, Bennett wrote about her decision. Vegetating for years in a hospital — in diapers, incompetent, a financial and physical burden — was a prospect she perceived as “ludicrous and wasteful.” 
 
 “Her position wasn’t just that she didn’t want to be a burden to others,” said Jonathan. “She was also considering the kind of life she would have. It would have been hard on the rest of us and not good enough for her.” 
 
 Her final gift to her children Sara, 56, and Guy, 55, was to call them home for a last weekend together on Bowen. 
 
 For the last few months, Guy said, his mother’s condition was declining. “She was in and out. She was very aware of the window closing.” 
 
 So when she called them to say that Monday would be the last day, the children were shocked but not surprised. 
 
 “The last weekend with her was surreal. It was just so painful. Really, really difficult,” said Guy. 
 
 But it was also extraordinary. Their mother had caught a “last wind,” Guy said. Her wit and humour were sharper than ever. She was on her game. 
 
 During a night in the house that seemed like any other night, Bennett got into a dispute with her husband about the themes of Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale. She argued vehemently that the play had to do with the mixing of blood, inbreeding, genes. Her husband argued that the play was all about class. 
 
 Jonathan didn’t hold back, telling his wife she was wrong and pulling examples from the text to support his argument in a last battle of two formidable intellects. 
 
 “He was very clearly right,” said Guy, “but my mother came up to me in the kitchen and said, ‘Your father appears to have a point.’” She glanced in her husband’s direction and added in a sly aside, “But we won’t tell him that.” 
 
 Bennett had private moments with each of her children, taking Guy on a vigorous hike to the top of a high hill where they could take in the view. The next day she went for a walk alone with his sister. 
 
 “The last thing she said to me, I was crying, she held my hand and said, ‘The only thing you need to do is just keep being you.’” 
 
 In spite of going public with her choice, Sara describes her mother as very private. Funny. Smart. Irreverent. 
 
 For Sara, her mother is gone too soon. She believes that had there been legal, humane medical options, her mother might still be alive. 
 
 “If someone could have helped her, she wouldn’t have had to die yesterday. She could have waited. If the law was different so that she could have had help, she would not have had to choose to end her life as soon as she did. That is the hardest thing.” 
 
 Sara struggles to hold back her tears. “Even though my mom died painlessly in exactly the way she chose, at the time she chose, knowing that she left the legacy she chose, it’s still unbelievably painful.” 
 
 Bennett, a mother of two, grandmother of six and great-grandmother of two, wanted to be remembered for who she was, said Jonathan: “Lively and full of life and ideas and encouragement. An opener of doors.” 
 
 The final door she wanted to open for others, as she carefully closed her own, was simply, said Sara, “A conversation. About this.” 
 
 dryan@vancouversun.com 
 
 READ ORIGINAL STORY: http://www.vancouversun.com/health/Dead+noon+woman+ends+life+rather+than+suffer+indignity/10132068/story.html 
 
 === 
 
 VIEW MORE PHOTOS HERE, or if you're using a mobile device, tap the story image and swipe. 
 
 === 
 
 Click here to report a typo or visit vancouversun.com/typo. 
 
 Is there more to this story? We'd like to hear from you about this or any other stories you think we should know about. CLICK HERE or go to vancouversun.com/moretothestory
– An elderly woman, knowing she was suffering from dementia, chose to leave the world on her own terms this week—and she left behind a website calling for the right to physician-assisted suicide. Gillian Bennett, of British Columbia, wrote on the site that she didn't want to end up a "carcass" living with "no one inside," the Vancouver Sun reports. In dying, she said, "all I lose is an indefinite number of years of being a vegetable in a hospital setting, eating up the country's money but not having the faintest idea of who I am." So she took a combination of whiskey and sleeping pills Monday. Bennett, who was in her 80s, called for a legally-required living will for everyone age 50 and over, saying she hoped that views toward assisted suicide would change, CTV News reports. She and her husband were aware that legally, no one else could contribute to her dying process, the Sun notes. "Gillian and I both disliked and disapproved of the laws making it impossible to help a loved one with something as important as death," he says. Bennett died on a mattress in a favorite outdoor spot as her husband sat beside her. As they sat together, "she was absolutely not frightened … She was as calm and peaceful as you could imagine," her husband says.