(Peter is the executive director of the World Federation Right to Die Society (WFRtDS). He has a background of political activism and end of life advocacy. He worked for 15 years in the private office of Scottish politician Margo MacDonald. During that time Peter helped prepare two proposals to legalize assisted dying. In 2016, Peter began a four-year stint as the Chair of Friends at the End (FATE). These days he lives and works out of Barcelona, his adopted city. This article is used with permission and was recently posted in the WFRtDS Autumn 2026 Newsletter.)
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During July, I traveled to Switzerland with someone who had decided to die there.
I won’t write much about the day itself. It was theirs, not mine, and they were entitled to their privacy in life, and that remains so now. I will say that it was peaceful, that it was unmistakably their own decision, and that they were ready.
What I cannot stop thinking about is everything that came before.
This person left their own country quietly. They did not tell most of their friends. Several people who loved them did not know they were going, because being told might have exposed them to legal risk, or to the awful position of deciding whether to say something. There were no goodbyes at home. There was no gathering. They boarded a plane as though going on holiday, and they died in a country they had no connection to, in a room they had never seen, among people they had met that week.
They were not doing anything wrong. They were dying; they knew it, and they wanted some say in how it happened. For that, they had to behave as though they were doing something shameful.
I have worked on this issue for years, and have always understood that to be able to choose an assisted death should be a fundamental human right. It is fundamentally cruel not to allow this. The cruelty is not only in the deaths people are forced to endure when they have no choice, but it is also in what we do to those who find a way out. We make them into fugitives.
We take the last weeks of a person’s life, weeks that should be full of their family and their friends and their home, and we fill them with secrecy, logistics, air fares and fear of implicating the people they love.
Nobody should have to leave their own country to die on their own terms. Nobody should have to lie to their friends about where they are going. That a person can only obtain the peaceful death they seek by becoming, in effect, a stranger in a foreign room is not a safeguard. It is a failure. A failure of law, of imagination, and of compassion.
I came home more determined than I have ever been. I did not think that was possible.
To every colleague reading this, in every one of our member societies and beyond—this is the work. Whether your parliament votes next week or in ten years, whether your law is generous or restrictive, every law we change allows another person the option to die at home, in their own bed, with their own people around them, without having to pretend.
Let us get on with it.
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Final Exit Network (FEN) is a network of dedicated professionals and caring, trained volunteers who support mentally competent adults as they navigate their end-of-life journey. Established in 2004, FEN seeks to educate qualified individuals in practical, peaceful ways to end their lives, offer a compassionate bedside presence and defend a person’s right to choose. For more information, go to www.finalexitnetwork.org.
Payments and donations are tax deductible to the full extent allowed by law. Final Exit Network is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization.
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