AUTHOR OBITUARY –
Jan. 26, 2025 – His wife picked the time to die. “You better go and get it,” Derek Humphry said he was told shortly before 1 p.m. on March 29, 1975, at their home near Bath, England.
Mr. Humphry, a newspaper journalist, said he mixed a lethal dose of a barbiturate and painkillers into a mug of coffee. He added plenty of sugar.
Jean Humphry’s cancer had spread to her bones, and drugs could no longer control the pain. She was 42.
“She picked up the mug of coffee on her own volition and drank it down and just before she passed out she said, ‘Goodbye, my love,’” recalled Mr. Humphry.
Fifty minutes later she was dead, and Mr. Humphry was left with three young children and the knowledge that he broke British law by assisting his wife to take her life. The moment also set Mr. Humphry on a path to become one of the leaders of the right-to-die movement in the United States — co-founding the Hemlock Society, writing the bestseller “Final Exit” (1991) and helping push through a landmark law in Oregon in 1994 to legalize physician-assisted suicide.
