In February 2024, after a decade-long battle with early-onset dementia, British author Wendy Mitchell chose to stop eating and drinking. She details her decision-making process in a post titled, “My final hug in a mug….” on the blog Which Me am I Today? Wendy started her blog shortly after her diagnosis of early-onset Alzheimer’s and vascular dementia at age 58. For the next ten years, she shared her thoughts about and experiences with living with dementia. She became a best-selling author along the way, first with the memoir written with her co-author Anna Wharton, Somebody I Used to Know, followed by What I Wish People Knew about Dementia. Their final collaboration, One Last Thing: Living with the End in Mind, was published half a year before Wendy’s passing, and focuses (as the title suggests) on death: how to prepare for it, how to talk about it with loved ones, and why choosing how and when we die should be a human right.
While Mitchell learned of VSED during the writing of her final book, she had in fact decided to travel to Switzerland later in the year to end her life at Dignitas, the Swiss non-profit organization that provides physician-assisted suicide to people with terminal illness or severe physical or mental illness. But then, still at home in the UK at the end of January, she fell down a flight of stairs and was hospitalized with two broken wrists and spinal damage. The fall accelerated the course of her dementia, as physical trauma often does, and she worried that if her disease progressed too far, she would not have the capacity to make decisions for her health care. So, shortly after being released from the hospital, with the support of friends and family, she voluntarily stopped eating and drinking.
“In the end, after my accident, the only choice open to me was to stop eating and drinking,” she explained in her final blog post. “I decided this was my time to end this cruel life dementia had thrust upon me. I wasn’t depressed, I wasn’t forced or cajoled in any way whatsoever, it was solely down to my choice. I was ready. You may or may not agree with what I’ve done, how and when I’ve chosen to leave this world, but the decision was totally mine.”
While Wendy Mitchell might have wished to live longer as her full self, she did manage to escape losing that self entirely by voluntarily stopping eating and drinking. The blog post she directed her daughters to publish after her death ends with a nod to the power of autonomy and personal choice: “[D]ementia didn’t play the winning card–I did.”