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 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. "I just sat there and held her hand," her husband Jonathan Bennett told CTV Vancouver. Bennett's husband and family were aware of her decision ahead of time, 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," she wrote. Bennett pointed to law, religion and medicine as three institutions that need to change their approaches to assisted suicide. 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. Bennett's son and daughter spent the weekend visiting with her before she died. She knew that it was approaching the time when she could just wake up one morning and not remember her plan." “If someone could have helped her, she wouldn’t have had to die yesterday. 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. 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.
– 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.