In Netherlands euthanasia and assisted suicide they are legal if someone voluntarily requests them and their suffering, physical or psychological, is assessed by doctors as “unbearable” and with no prospect of improvement. So Jan and Elsa Dutch couple of seventy-year-olds married for almost 50 years, died together at the beginning of June after two doctors gave them a lethal drug: it is legal and rare, but every year more and more Dutch couples they choose to end their lives in this way.
Jan and Els, a life together
The BBC reports the story, retracing the happy years of the couple – a life together after meeting at kindergarten, they were also linked by their love for the outdoors and at times unconventional life, such as the choice to live on a boat along the Dutch canals – but also by the suffering, which began in 2003 for her husband, Jan, with a back operation. A slow and difficult recoverya heavy treatment based on painkillers which was then interrupted because it was ineffective in the long run, Jan was forced shortly afterwards to stop working, while his wife Els continued to practice her profession as a teacher at that time.
The choice of couple euthanasia
But even then Jan gathered his family and explained that he didn’t intend to live too long with the physical limitations that were now for him
irreversible. And in the same period the couple joined the Nvve, the Dutch organization for the “right to die”. Then it was Els’s turn to show unmistakable signs of suffering, to the point of inducing her to retire from teaching in 2018 and in 2022 came the diagnosis of dementia. It was after Els learned that her condition would not improve that she, with her husband Jan and their son, began to discuss «duo-euthanasia». At 70 years old, Jan and 71 Els thus chose to die together at the beginning of June.
«When you take too many medicines you live like a zombie» Jan said to the BBC correspondent who met them: in recent years the chronic pain in his back had become unbearable, while his wife Els nodded also pointing to his head: it was now struggles to formulate sentences.
In 2023, 9,068 people died from euthanasia in the Netherlandscirca 5% of the total number of deaths. Among these, there were 33 cases of “duo-euthanasia”, or 66 people.
