Assisted suicide of healthy 79-yr-old renews debate on right to die

Schardt’s suicide — and Kusch’s energetic publicising of it —have set off a national furor over the limits on the right to die, in a country that has struggled with this issue more than most because of the Nazis’ euthanising of at least 100,000 mentally disabled and incurably ill people.

“What Kusch did was particularly awful,” Beate Merk, the Justice Minister of Bavaria, said. “This woman had nothing wrong other than her fear. He didn’t offer her any other options.”

Germany’s conservative chancellor, Angela Merkel, declared on a German news channel on Wednesday: “I am absolutely against any form of assisted suicide, in whatever guise it comes.”

By helping Schardt end her life, and then broadcasting the result, Kusch has, in effect, hung out a shingle. A former senior government official from Hamburg, Kusch, 53, said he would help other people like her who decide of their own free will to commit suicide.

In Schardt’s case, he counseled her about how to commit suicide, but did not provide or administer the drugs. He videotaped the entire process as proof that he was not an active participant. Prosecutors have looked into the case, but it does not appear that Kusch is in legal jeopardy.

While Schardt was not suffering from a life-threatening disease, or in acute pain, her life was hardly pleasant, Kusch said. She had trouble moving around her apartment, where she lived alone. Having never married, she had no family. She also had few friends, and rarely ventured out.

In such circumstances, a nursing home seemed likely to be the next stop. And for Schardt, who Kusch said feared strangers and had a low tolerance for those less clever than she was, that was an unbearable prospect.

“When she contacted me by e-mail on April 8, she had already decided to commit suicide,” Kusch said.

In a goodbye letter to Kusch, posted on his website, Schardt thanked him, saying that if her death helped his battle it would fulfill her goal to have “the freedom to die in dignity.”

To some champions of assisted suicide, Germany’s laws do not allow for enough dignity. The larger lesson of Schardt’s solitary death may have to do with the way Germany treats its old. “The fear of nursing homes among elderly Germans is far greater than the fear of terrorism or the fear of losing your job,” said Eugen Brysch, the director of the German Hospice Foundation.