Digital

Digital Life

“It is no longer necessary to spend hours fuming in the traffic,
daffodils wilting and tempers fraying, to pay one’s respects
to the mortal remains of Nonna (Granny). Rome now has its
own cyber-cemetery, a web-site where mourners can click
their way to virtual gravestones, and leave either thoughts or
electronic flowers. The flowers thus deposited do not die;
and there are no problems with weeds, vandals, subsidence
and property developers.

Sunday Independent, 30 March 2003″

Extract from THE GOOD CEMETERY GUIDE

Assisted Suicide of Healthy 79-Year-Old Renews German Debate on Right to Die

*Roger Kusch, with a video of Bettina Schardt, 79, whom he helped to commit suicide.*

FRANKFURT –

…Her last words, after swallowing a deadly cocktail of the antimalaria drug chloroquine and the sedative diazepam, were “auf Wiedersehen,” Mr. Kusch recounted at a news conference on Monday.

…While Ms. Schardt was not suffering from a life-threatening disease, or in acute pain, her life was hardly pleasant, Mr. 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 Ms. Schardt, who Mr. Kusch said feared strangers and had a low tolerance for those less clever than she was, that was an unbearable prospect…

…The larger lesson of Ms. 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. “Germany must confront this fear, because fear, as we have seen, is a terrible adviser.”

http://www.nytimes.com