Maureen Slough had announced to her family that she was going on vacation in Lithuania. In reality, this 58 -year -old Irishwoman had contacted the Pegasos, Switzerland organization, specializing in assisted suicide.
At the beginning of July, she took the plane alone for Zurich, without informing her daughter or her relatives, who discovered her gesture only after her death. Only a close friend of the fifties had to keep it secret. He will eventually warn his daughter. She puts on her father and they both try to bring Maureen back. She then promises to come back.
Unfortunately, the next day, an icing WhatsApp message from the clinic announces his death. And specifies that his ashes will be shipped by packages.
An almost impossible death to overcome
This secret plunged her daughter, Megan Royal, in immense pain. Deprived of all farewell, she says she has received this impersonal message, without condolences, followed a few weeks later by a package containing her mother’s funerary urn. An experience she described as inhuman, strengthening the trauma linked to this brutal disappearance.
For loved ones, the brutality of the news has devastating consequences. “”The hardest part is experienced by his daughter: to be held away is to feel abandoned, even betrayed“Note psychologist Amélie Boukhobza.
“Receiving the death of her mother by a message and ashes is an incredible psychic violence. Mourning becomes almost impossible, because he is without shared words, without accompaniment, without answers”.
How to explain that we can end your life without warning your loved ones?
For the psychologist, this secret choice reveals a radical desire to keep control over her latest gesture. “Not to say anything to his loved ones is staggering. Probably not to be arrested in his approach”.
A way to completely control things, without accounting.
“”To decide to die in secret is to want to keep control until the end. Do not expose your fragility, do not explain it, do not leave others the possibility of intervening. It is not necessarily a lack of love, but a radical way of preserving your intimacy and your choice. An extreme determination“, Details the specialist again.
His own daughter was therefore not made aware. Can we imagine that it comes from a faulty relationship between them? “”The lack of mother-daughter proximity would not explain everything. It can play, but it is deeper: there is a relationship with autonomy, dignity, refusal to be vulnerable. Behind, there is undoubtedly an existential loneliness which goes beyond family ties “.
In summary, this secret choice confronts loved ones with a unique suffering, according to Amélie Boukhobza. “”This drama says how secret suicide, when he is kept secret, leaves loved ones in front of a double penalty: to lose the loved one and not have had a place in this last choice “.
Have the assisted suicide procedures been respected?
Precisely, what questions in this tragic history is the fact that no close was requested by the Swiss company. But according to her, all the regulatory stages were respected. A psychiatric assessment was even carried out, concluding that Maureen was “healthy” and capable of making an informed decision.
The clinic also claims to have received a letter signed by her daughter validating the choice of the deceased. But Megan Royal formally denies: she claims to have never written or validated such a document. The family even suspects that Maureen has created an email address to his name in order to provide false evidence.
This revelation questions the seriousness of the verifications carried out by the Swiss organization. How could an email address, potentially created by the patient herself, could it be enough to validate such an irreversible decision? Especially since Pegasos had already been criticized in the past for its lack of transparency and its deficient communication with families.
Maureen’s brother, lawyer, has since seized the British and Irish authorities to request an investigation. If this will not revive her deceased mother, it may lead to the implementation of more rigorous verification protocols.