The Choice of How We Die

The final countdown to death: Justine Hardy

September 2022 View The Oldie Magazine

The final countdown

When Norah Vincent, a bestselling American writer, went to a Swiss clinic to end her life, her friend Justine Hardy travelled with her

Norah Vincent on 5th July 2022, the day before she died

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Walt Whitman

Green Light Day

As we sit in gridlocked traffic, we are bickering because we have just missed a turning and now we are stuck.

The jam is making us late, and so we are burbling away in the same way as we always have since we first met 16 years ago. It is oddly reassuring – both right and human. It is because of these two things, being right and human, that we are trying to work out how to get back to the little road that we have just missed.

Norah Vincent has flown in from New York to meet a wise, careful psychiatrist who will decide if this is to be Green Light Day.

She is 53, a New York Times bestseller author whose fourth and final book was Adeline, a novel based on her exhaustive research into the last part of Virginia Woolf’s life and her suicide.

The book is as much autobiographical as fictionalised biography: Norah has attempted suicide twice since she wrote it in ways that cannot be described as ‘cries for help’.

As Norah wrote later, ‘When you have spent the better part of your adult life vigorously entertaining and just as vociferously disavowing thoughts of self-harm, because you know that acknowledging them can be used as a pretext for committing you to a locked psychiatric facility against your will, over time, something very odd happens to those thoughts. In your mind, they constitute a substantial portion of the decor, like well-worn wallpaper, so familiar as to be invisible. They are always there, and you never talk about them with anyone – not honestly.’

It is a sentiment mirrored exactly in the character of Septimus Warren Smith, a shell-shocked veteran of the First World War in Woolf’s novel Mrs Dalloway (1925). Septimus throws himself from a window, rather than submit himself to the care suggested by a psychiatrist rather different from the one we are now trying to find.

‘Do you understand why she wants to die?’ the psychiatrist asks me

This man, the one at the end of the road we are searching for, is the next step in assessing whether Norah’s constellation of suffering qualifies her for a Voluntary Assisted Death, a VAD, as it is referred to over the days to come.

She is jet-lagged but her ability to answer his questions, to articulate and flesh out her desire for death, is laser-like. This time she can be entirely honest.

‘Do you understand why she wants to die?’ he asks me, as her witness. I start, backtrack and over-explain.

I do understand. I am prepared to witness her death, but I am an optimist and so a mustard seed remains that champions life.

‘He got me,’ she says as we drive away.

He has indeed and Norah feels wholly seen.

Travel Day

The path is smooth. As a jumpy trio that hunkered away from all travel once the pandemic hit, each of us has anticipated every possible travel drama.

Norah is afraid of being stopped at each border and asked why she has a one-way ticket.

I am sure that British Airways will cut their summer strike schedule and that we will be lolling on plastic chairs amid sandwich wrappers at Heathrow as Norah’s death date ticks by. Jeremy, the third leg of our stool, is worried about whether England will knock off the runs against India at Edgbaston while we are in the air.

No one asks Norah anything difficult. I am too busy trying to vomit tidily into air-sickness bags to worry about anything much. And Jeremy chuckles over his book.

We become as one again in the taxi from the airport, as the meter ticks past the 100-Swiss-franc mark almost before the airport is out of sight.

The utilitarian hotel in a nondescript Swiss suburb is easy to find, the clinic less so. While Switzerland is probably the most familiar of the 11 countries that allow this kind of decision, most of the world is still not at ease with the human right to be able to decide when and how we die.

The anonymous clinic is shy and understandably so. We are wandering around an industrial estate in bright, sweaty sun when a tall, tanned young man waves from an unmarked doorway.

Norah hugs him in delight. ‘You’re a gorgeous specimen,’ she says. He smiles, with only the faintest blush beneath his golden skin.

While Norah talks, Jeremy and I look at bowls of Lindt chocolate balls and mini Toblerones, wondering who might want a sugar rush at the very eleventh hour.

D-Day

Early morning and the café bar downstairs is in its rush hour.

The tables are crowded with a mixture of construction workers in neon, billeted at the hotel while working on a station underpass, a damp tunnel that became familiar in the to-and-fro to the clinic ahead of today, D-Day.

Among the construction workers are businessmen in slim-cut trousers and pointy shoes, talking loudly over plates of tiny pâté en croute and square-cut ham.

Norah and a couple of others are the third kind of breakfasters. She still has a robust appetite. Food has remained a comfort and the countdown days have been a round of final lunches, suppers and milk and cookies in between.

She has several croissants with strawberry and rhubarb jam, and very strong coffee as she would like one last hooray of a bowel movement. This is important to her – a last dignity.

She is afraid of being stopped at the border and asked why she has a one-way ticket

We walk among the vegetable gardens and maize fields on either side of the back route to the clinic. We are all exhausted after the vigil of the night, hours spent walking among the same strimmed patches of beans and cabbages, telling stories.

It was not a whitewash of happy-clappy, sun-kissed tales, but truthful: a line of Emily Dickinson in one breath, another round of faintly banal bickering the next. Norah is indeed being ‘CALLED BACK’*.

It is now just after 11am in the cool, white room – the time she chose.

‘What time is it?’ she asks.

‘11:04,’ I tell her, reading off the phone I am using to scroll to the music she wants to hear.

‘The time doesn’t matter now,’ says the anaesthetist, another wise veteran in his field, who smiles almost all the time without a false note.

He and his colleague leave the room for a while, and we can hear them next door chatting with Jeremy. It is the hubbub of the normal.

I remember asking my father when he was dying if he minded us all chatting around him. ‘It is reassuring,’ he whispered.

For Norah, it is a sound she has missed for many years in her pain and isolation. Yet its return now isn’t causing regret. She too is reassured. We are lying beside each other on a double bed, the cannula in her hand the only sign to separate this moment out from so many others.

She is smiling as we listen to Nina Simone, to tracks either side of the one she has chosen. It is 11:30am now. ‘I’m ready. Now voyager,’ she says. The others return.

Norah pushes the small wheel that opens the drip. She is held, her hand tapping on her leg as Nina sings, ‘I wish I knew how it would feel to be free.’

And then she is.

In memoriam Norah Mary Vincent, 20th September 1968 to 6th July 2022

* ‘CALLED BACK’ is all that is written on Emily Dickinson’s gravestone in West Cemetery, Amherst, Massachusetts, besides her name and dates

ow voyager sail thou forth to seek and find.’

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