“By the time you read this, I’ll be dead”

John Hofsess helped eight people die and just before he died late last month at an assisted death facility in Switzerland, he wrote this piece.

I was horrified anew in 1999 when the gifted conductor Georg Tintner, who was dying from a rare form of melanoma, jumped from the balcony of his 11th-floor apartment in Halifax to end his agony. Many Canadians would hear such news, shake their heads, utter a few sympathetic platitudes and move on. But I couldn’t just sit back and wring my hands. That year, I went from advocating for assisted suicides to facilitating them. Let’s not mince words: I killed people who wanted to die.

(via nextdraft)

• death
• John Hofsess
• medicine