NEW YORK: Gill Pharaoh was a geriatric care nurse who had spent years caring for the elderly. When she herself began to grow old, she decided that she didn’t want to go through what her patients had suffered, travelled to Switzerland, and passed away at an assisted dying clinic. She was not terminally ill. She didn’t want to be elderly and infirm.
Given Pharaoh worked with those who are old, she clearly knew what the lot of the elderly in this country is. And she didn’t like it. She wrote before her death on 21 July that she didn’t want to go further ‘downhill’ and that life ‘is not going to start to get better’.
She has triggered a renewed debate on euthanasia…