A healthy 75-year-old former nurse who spent her life looking after the elderly decided getting old was not for her and opted to be euthanized at a Swiss suicide clinic.
The Daily Mail is reporting on the story of Gill Pharaoh, a London nurse who so dreaded becoming old that she decided to take her own life in order to avoid it. She died on July 21 at an assisted dying clinic called Lifecircle in Basel, Switzerland.
Pharaoh leaves behind a husband, a son, a daughter, and a grandson.
She admits that her daughter struggled with her decision and said in an interview shortly before her death, “ . . . [M]y kids are backing me, although it is not their choice.”
In her last blog post, Pharaoh admits to being healthy and calls her list of complaints “trivial” – such as losing her love for gardening, travel and exploring the streets of London.
“I have always loved cooking but I find it an effort now and prefer to have a couple of friends for lunch rather than a large late dinner party. Not to mention the hundred and one other minor irritations like being unable to stand for long, carry a heavy shopping bag, run for a bus, remember the names of books I have read, or am reading, or their authors.”
However, her own experience, and her many years nursing the elderly, have taught her that once a person hits 70, it all goes downhill after that and this is what she wants to avoid.
“Until I was 70 I was very fit and able to fully participate in any activity I wanted to do. I felt I could still be busy and useful and fairly productive. Then I had a severe attack of shingles and it all changed. At 75 I am told I look OK and I take no medication. However, I feel my life is complete and I am ready to die. My family are well and happy – their lives are full and busy.”
Admitting that she has “no belief in any of the gods,” she feels the ideal “shelf life” for a person is about 70 years. There are some who are busy and active into their 80s and 90s, she says, but “they are the fortunate ones and are fewer in number.”
Pharaoh was aided in her decision to die by Dr. Michael Irwin, a euthanasia activist who formed a group known as the Society of Old Age Rational Suicide (SOARS).
The organization claims its main goal is to change UK law so that “very elderly, mentally competent individuals, who are suffering unbearably from various health problems (although none of them is ‘terminal’) are allowed to receive a doctor’s assistance to die, if this is their persistent choice. Surely the decision to decide, at an advanced age, that enough is enough and, avoiding further suffering, to have a dignified death is the ultimate human right for a very elderly person.”
In her last missive to the world, Pharaoh blames people who believe in God for her troubles.
“I ask that the lawmakers should listen to, and respect, the views of people like me, and I am not alone in holding this view. We are being ignored by the law, which originates from a god in whom we have no belief, and which is upheld and enforced by people who have no proof of the existence of any god at all and yet still seek to impose their views on everyone else.”
The real tragedy in this whole story is that Pharaoh lived her whole life without the joy of knowing Jesus Christ. If she had, He would have given her plenty of reason to continue living for others’ sake, if not her own. She would have been glad to suffer for Someone who endured so much for her sake and would have regarded it as a privilege to join her sufferings to His for the sake of the world. What meaning she could have found in every drop of suffering she endured!
Instead of torturing herself with so much anxious forethought about the future, she would have had a God in whom she could trust with the end of her days and His choice for her passing from this world. Pharaoh assumed it would all go badly, but God’s plans are mysterious and she might have died peacefully in her sleep or taken after just a brief illness.
No one who has ever met Jesus needs proof of His existence and we can only pray that Christians will shine their light bright enough to illumine the cold and lonely darkness in which too many “Pharaohs” are living and dying.
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