My good friend Phyllis Schacter sent me this article about a woman of 85, Gillian Bennet, who decided to take her own life when she felt that dementia was turning her “into a vegetable.” The article, “Dead at noon: B.C. woman ends her life rather than suffer indignity of dementia,” was written by Denise Ryan for the Vancouver Sun, August 25, 2014.

There seems to be a growing awareness among people who are heading into advanced forms of dementia of an option to carefully and consciously end their lives before reaching a point of no return to normal awareness. Below is Gillian’s story and that of her family of her journey into death.

Earlier on this website I posted a similar story about Alan Schacter, Phyllis ‘s husband. Alan chose to die by starvation and dehydration, rather than enter into the advanced stages of Alzheimer’s, a disease that took both his parents. Since his death, Phyllis has had a great deal of contact with her husband, who  seems to be stunningly adjusted and brilliantly aware in his present reality. In fact, it was in after-death communication with Alan when he urged Phyllis to contact me. For their story, click here.

The deaths of Alan and Gillian bring up enormously important questions about dementia and whether or not dementia plays a purposeful role in the death process. They also provoke even broader questions about how and when a person should engineer his or her own death. Death by choice, or as assisted suicide is often called, death with dignity, is an enormously complex issue, legally and emotionally. The line between euthanasia and willful medical neglect of the ill and disabled is often difficult to determine. Each country, each US state, has its own laws, laws that are continuously under attack, for or against assisted suicide. Problems are especially prominent in the Netherlands where many cases of what seem to be more murder than euthanasia have been uncovered in hospitals.

Both Alan and Gillian died peacefully, without an iota of fear, and both expressly asked that their stories be made known publicly to raise popular awareness of death by choice.




Before the shadows of dementia began to cloak her mind, Bennett created a website, “Dead at Noon,” to be made public after her death, on which she makes a passionate case for physician-assisted options for the terminally ill and elderly.















Dementia had crept in bit by bit.



















