a story on euthanasia
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In April 2017, The New York Times sent me to Japan to meet and photograph the decorated Paralympic athlete Marieke Vervoort while she carried out the last wish on her bucket list: dying.
Marieke was fresh off the Paralympic circuit, having just won bronze and silver medals in wheelchair racing in Rio de Janeiro in 2016. She had previously won gold in the 2015 world championships, as well as gold and silver in the 2012 London Paralympics. She was a celebrity in Belgium and in athletic circles for her athletic accomplishments and her public announcement that she had completed the paperwork to end her life by euthanasia.
Belgium, where Marieke lived, was one of just a handful of countries where euthanasia was legal for non-terminally ill patients. Marieke’s degenerative muscular disease was not terminal, but as it worked its way up her body over two decades, it left behind a trail of paralysis.
I met and photographed Marieke in Japan, seven months after the Rio Games. She invited the Times sportswriter Andrew Keh and me to document her life, her suffering and her struggle with deciding when to die. She was savvy enough to understand that a poignant story and series of images could bring attention to her decade-long campaign for the global right to euthanasia. I ended up shuttling between my home in London and hers in Diest, Belgium, for two and a half years.
MARIEKE’S STORY See Lynsey Addario’s photos and read Andrew Keh’s article about the life and death of the Paralympian Marieke Vervoort.
Marieke planned every detail of her death. She wanted to be surrounded by a handful of close friends and her parents in her bedroom in Diest when she was administered the lethal injection; she wanted to lie in a Coca-Cola red coffin surrounded by white roses; she carefully selected the speakers (including a comedian, whom she instructed to tell a dirty joke) and musicians for her private funeral. She would be cremated, and most of her ashes would be partitioned into little lockets for all her loved ones. A portion would be reserved and spread by her parents among the fields of lava by the dark blue sea in Los Hervideros, on the Spanish coast: her beloved second home, where she trained for the Paralympics.
She had no regrets. In fact, she had done more than most people do in 10 lifetimes.
But there never really seemed to be a right time to die. While Marieke first did the paperwork for euthanasia in 2008, she admitted she wasn’t ready to end her life then. She just wanted the option of knowing she had the power and the permission to do so when the pain became unbearable. In the years I photographed Marieke, her condition deteriorated, and she selected three dates for euthanasia. All came and went, for different reasons, and the story — and our friendship — continued.I have spent my entire career photographing people whose lives were stolen from them by measles or malaria in the Democratic Republic of Congo or South Sudan, malnutrition in Somalia or Yemen, a car bomb in Iraq or an airstrike in Syria. I’ve photographed families torn apart by war and extreme poverty. Until Marieke, I had never met someone who had elected to die. I had never met someone so full of life — so emotionally determined that she could complete a triathlon in a wheelchair while deeply sick and heavily medicated — but who couldn’t muster that determination to plow through the daily pain and loneliness of a degenerative muscular disease, year after year.