Campaigning pensioner travels to Switzerland for assisted suicide

Nan Maitland, 84, a founder of the Society for Old Age Rational Suicide (Soars), did not suffer from a terminal illness but suffered increasing pain from arthritis.

The mother of three, who was separated, said her life involved “more pain than pleasure” and travelled with two colleagues for the doctor-assisted death.

Friends At The End (Fate), a Glasgow-based right-to-die group, released the goodbye message she wrote to family and friends last night.

It said: “By the time you read this, with the help of Fate and the good Swiss, I will have gone to sleep, never to wake.

“For some time, my life has consisted of more pain than pleasure and over the next months and years the pain will be more and the pleasure less.

“I have a great feeling of relief that I will have no further need to struggle through each day in dread of what further horrors may lie in wait.”

She added: “With my death, on March 1, I feel I am fully accepting the concept of ‘old age rational suicide’ which I have been very pleased to promote, especially in the past 15 months.”

Mrs Maitland, a former occupational therapist who lived in Chelsea, London, travelled the world as part of the controversial movement and her death will reopen the debate about assisted suicide.

Fate’s convener and medical adviser, Dr Libby Wilson, said: “While we support Nan Maitland’s motives and method of death, we and indeed she, no doubt, regret that it was necessary to travel so far from home in order to die with dignity and in the manner of one’s own choice.”

A spokesman for Dignity in Dying said it opposed Mrs Maitland’s stance: “Dignity in Dying does not support a change in the law to allow non-terminally ill people the legal option to ask for help to end their life – we campaign for a change in the law to allow the choice of assisted dying for terminally ill, mentally competent adults only.

“No one should have to suffer against their wishes in the final days and weeks of their lives, and the law should seek to address this, as well as seeking to protect vulnerable people against abuse.”