Duo-euthanasia: When your parents choose to die
The couple’s only child describes their final days and the emotional burden of a rare legal practice that 108 people chose in 2024.
5 Articles
5 Articles
Early in the morning of June 2024, Bass pulled up to his parents' camper van, parked in a sunny marina in the northern Netherlands. His seventy-year-old father, Jan, and mother, Elsa, were already waiting for him. It was the last time the three of them went anywhere together – the parents were later given a lethal drug.
Bas led his parents to the palliative care center, where they chose to die together through euthanasia. The father suffered from chronic pain, and the mother had dementia. The man tells about their last day and lonely feelings.
In the Netherlands, Jan and Els ended their lives simultaneously by euthanasia in June 2024, lying side-by-side in a nursing home. Their only child, Bas, who drove his father, who was suffering from pain, and his mother, who had been diagnosed with dementia, away that morning, told the BBC two years later about the farewell, his attempts to dissuade them, and the loneliness that followed.
Els and Jan Sought medical intervention to end their lives after 50 happy years of marriage, leaving behind their only child.
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