The sky is a glorious blue. The cherry trees are in full bloom. It is the sort of day that makes you feel glad to be alive. Isn’t it, Wendy?
Wendy Duffy gives a little half smile. ‘I won’t change my mind,’ she says. ‘I know it’s hard for you, sweetheart. It will be hard for everyone. But I want to die, and that’s what I’m going to do. And I’ll have a smile on my face when I do, so please be happy for me. My life; my choice.’
By the time you read this, Wendy, a 56-year-old former care worker from the West Midlands, will have boarded a plane to Switzerland with a one-way ticket. She does not intend to return.
Her journey to Pegasos, the controversial ‘suicide clinic’ which has agreed to help her end her life, has been over a year in the planning.
‘I can’t wait,’ she says, admitting that she started a digital countdown on her phone once she ‘got the green light’ late last year.
She has paid £10,000, written all the letters to her loved ones, picked out what she is going to wear on her deathbed, and chosen the music which, she insists, will be the last thing she hears.
‘You can choose whatever song you want. I’m going to go out to Lady Gaga and Bruno Mars singing Die With A Smile.’
Another almost-smile follows, an apologetic one this time. ‘You’ll never be able to hear that song now without thinking of me, will you?’
‘I won’t change my mind,’ Wendy Duffy says. ‘I know it’s hard for you, sweetheart. It will be hard for everyone. But I want to die, and that’s what I’m going to do’
Wendy lost her only child, Marcus, in shocking circumstances four years ago
What is wrong with Wendy? It was the first thing I asked when I was contacted and informed that one of Pegasos’s British ‘guests’ would like to tell her story BEFORE she died.
I’d written about this clinic before. I knew it was one of the more, shall we say, problematic of the Swiss assisted-dying organisations with a less stringent acceptance criteria than the more famous Dignitas.
Still, how naive I was, wondering whether Wendy was suffering from cancer, motor neurone disease or one of those other hideous degenerative conditions that make desperate people get on planes to Switzerland while they still can.
The answer was infinitely more disturbing. Wendy, it was explained, is not dying. She is not even ill. She is physically healthy, but she lost her only child, Marcus, 23, in shocking circumstances four years ago, and no amount of therapy – and there has been lots, she insists – has convinced her that life is worth living.
She has already tried to take her own life and failed, ending up perilously close to being a ‘cabbage in a persistent vegetative state’.
She applied to Pegasos because she wants to make a ‘neater’ (her words) job of it next time, in a controlled and clinical setting.
‘I could step off a motorway bridge or a tower block but that would leave anyone finding me dealing with that for the rest of their lives,’ she says, bluntly. ‘I don’t want to put anyone through that.’
Even in Switzerland, the go-to destination for the ‘suicide tourist’, Wendy’s case is likely to be controversial.
Contrary to popular belief there is no explicit ‘right to die’ written into Swiss law, but – unlike in the UK – assisting suicide is legal if not done for self-serving motives.
While there is a whole industry geared up to dispense ‘help’ to die, it is not quite a case of death-on-demand for those who want it.
In practice, psychiatric-only cases (i.e. where there is no physical illness) are more contentious and requirements are strict. Organisations have to be able to show that the condition suffered is severe, long-lasting and treatment-resistant. Many clinics, such as Dignitas, refuse these cases entirely.
And yet, Wendy’s suffering has been deemed sufficient to meet the Pegasos criteria.
A panel of experts, including psychiatrists, has passed her application after months of assessment and having had access to her full medical records. Within days of her arrival in Switzerland, and subject to a final psychiatric assessment – a beyond-doubt in-person confirmation that she has mental capacity – she will be helped to die.
‘I have to administer the medication myself, that’s what the law says,’ she explains, talking me through the process.
‘They put the line in [to your arm] but you’ve got to turn the doobra [the dial] yourself to get it flowing. Then – ding, ding, ding – within a minute, you are in a coma, and a minute after that, you are gone.’
She not only sounds prepared for this process, but is looking forward to it. She talks like a woman heading to Barbados on holiday, bags packed, house vacuumed, already feeling the sunshine on her face.
‘Oh, I’m super-organised. I’ve watched videos and it’s absolutely lovely there. You look out on trees and nature, and it’s so peaceful. My only stipulation is that I’ve asked if they can make sure the big windows are open, so my spirit can be free.
‘I’ve asked that they give the things I’ve brought, including my suitcase, to an animal charity so that other people benefit. I hate waste, you see.
‘The only drawback is that I won’t be able to donate my organs, but there isn’t an option for that. I’ll be cremated there, so there won’t even be a funeral to worry about – I hate funerals anyway and don’t want one. My ashes will be sent back to my family, and I want them scattered at ‘his’ bench in the park, with his. It’s all planned.’
What of her family back here in the UK? If anyone travelled with her, or assisted her suicide in any way (even driving her to the airport), they would risk police investigation, if not prosecution in the UK.
She tells me her siblings (she has four sisters; two brothers) know that she applied to Pegasos. They don’t know the timescale for her ‘procedure’ – for their own protection.
‘Pegasos have been in touch with them. I will call them when I get to Switzerland. It will be a hard call where I’ll say goodbye and thank them. But they will get it. They know. Honestly, 100 per cent, they know that I’m not happy, that I don’t want to be here.’
They will be deeply hurt, surely? Distressed. Possibly angry. Wendy nods.
‘There will be a degree of that, but they don’t have to live my life. No one does.’
‘The day I discovered I was pregnant with Marcus was the happiest of my life,’ says Wendy
Wendy will not be the first British person to choose to make a clandestine journey to Switzerland to end it all, but she’s the first to be so up front about it.
Why is she making something that is normally secretive a matter of public record? She insists that it’s because she wants to be a part of the assisted dying debate.
‘My life; my choice. I wish this was available in the UK, then I wouldn’t have to go to Switzerland at all.’
She also wants to draw attention to the ‘unfairness’ of the current system on her family. ‘I’m not breaking the law. I don’t feel I’m doing anything wrong. Yet for them, it’s a mess.’
Some may well support her ‘right’ to die, but Wendy’s story will also be a grenade lobbed into the assisted dying debate, the last instalment of which, it so happens, is set to take place in the House of Lords tomorrow.
Those who oppose any change to British law have long argued that if we give terminally ill people the ‘right’ to die, under any circumstances, then it won’t be long before those who are not nearing the end of life will demand the same right. The slippery slope argument, if you will.
To many, Wendy’s case will suggest we aren’t just at the top of the slope, but some way down it.
The Daily Mail has not taken the decision to publish Wendy’s story lightly. We do so because there are other Wendys making this same journey, and in astonishing numbers – putting dozens of families in impossible situations.
Whatever British law says about assisted suicide, British individuals are regularly travelling to Pegasos to die. It has been confirmed to us that at least one such journey is being made from the UK to this clinic every single week.
When Pegasos founder Ruedi Habegger agrees to talk to me about Wendy’s case, he will not be drawn on exact figures, but I put it to him that her story must be most unusual, even for Pegasos. ‘No, no, no, it’s not,’ he says.
Habegger, a right-to-die activist, founded the Pegasos Swiss Association, a non-profit organisation based in Basel, in 2019.
It hit the headlines in the UK when it emerged that it had helped British teacher Alastair Hamilton, 47, to die in 2023.
Mr Hamilton had been complaining of stomach pains in the months leading up to his death, but he’d had no official diagnosis. He told his parents he was going to Paris on holiday and they only discovered his plans after his death.
Another case involving a British client, known only as Anne, 51, was also deeply contentious.
Anne had told Pegasos that her family were fully aware of her plans – but it emerged later that they were not; she had misled the clinic, and it had not checked.
Under Swiss law there is no requirement for families to be informed, but Pegasos insists that it changed its guidelines after these controversial cases and – Habegger confirms – now insist that they go to great lengths to verify that the family is aware.
I have already spoken to Wendy on the telephone several times before we meet in person, at a Midlands hotel, and from first contact am struck by how matter-of-fact she is. Also, how upbeat. She weeps during our interview, but only when she is talking about the death of her son.
When the subject turns to her own death, she radiates happiness, even joy. At one stage she gets up and, describing how her family will scatter her ashes, she does the ‘Shake n’ Vac’ routine from the carpet-cleaner adverts.
Wendy lost her only child, Marcus, in shocking circumstances four years ago. She tells me Marcus died because, hungover from a heavy night, he had fallen asleep on the living room sofa, while eating a sandwich
Wendy applied to the Pegasos clinic in Switzerland because she wants to make a ‘neater’ (her words) job of taking her life, in a controlled and clinical setting
By the end of our time together, I’ve told Wendy – an animal lover who waited until her two dogs had died of old age before she set a date at Pegasos – that I’m going to buy her a dog and deposit it on her doorstep, to give her a reason to live.
‘You could give me a house full of dogs. I’m doing this.’
She’s a warm, funny woman, full of, well, life. Decades working in the care sector has given her an ease with people, perhaps with difficult conversations too.
‘Oh, I’ve seen death a million times,’ she says. ‘I’ve sat with so many people as they’ve gone. I’ve seen nice deaths, horrible deaths. I want a nice, gentle one.’
She won’t let me meet her at her home because she does not want to give me her address. She also will not tell me the timescale for her ‘trip’, in case I do something to try to stop her.
It is a stipulation of the interview that it will not be published until she has informed her family of the exact date of her ‘procedure’, and that will be when she reaches Switzerland.
What sort of person goes to Switzerland to die? A very ordinary one, it turns out.
Wendy was born into a big Irish family. She never married but was with Marcus’s father (who she doesn’t want to name) for about 13 years. ‘Never married. Never wanted to, even though it was expected. I was the black sheep.’
She did want to be a mother, though. ‘It was all I ever wanted. I wanted lots of kids, but it just didn’t happen. I watched all my sisters and brothers pop them out, but for ten years, it didn’t happen for me.’
She details the medical investigations that showed damage to her fallopian tubes. She saw a fertility specialist, begged for help.
‘I told the consultant that I wasn’t greedy. If I could have one child, I would be the happiest woman in the world.’
Then, in 1998, she got her miracle. ‘The day I discovered I was pregnant with Marcus was the happiest of my life.’
She shows me pictures of Marcus, her ‘beautiful boy’, on her phone. She split from Marcus’s dad when he was around four, so mother and son were a tight unit. She worked hard, ‘saved for his future. Everything was about Markie.’
Music was Marcus’s passion. ‘He left school and had various jobs but music was his life. He was into recording. He loved hip-hop and grime. I’d be shouting, ‘turn that bloody thing down’. I’d give anything to be shouting at him to turn the music down today.
‘In the funeral home, I went in every day, and just sat with him, playing through his Spotify list. I broke when I saw him in there. My boy, on a metal table. You can’t come back from that, you know.’
Would it have mattered how Marcus died? Possibly not, but the traumatic nature of his death – and the fact that his mother, medically trained, tried to perform CPR herself – did contribute to the nightmares that came to haunt her.
She tells me he died because, hungover from a heavy night, he had fallen asleep on the living room sofa, while eating a sandwich.
‘I’d been making myself one. Cheese and onion, and he said he’d have one. ‘Throw a couple of those cherry tomatoes on mine,’ he said.’
She did, cutting them in half, ‘as I’d always done’. She left him to his sandwich and was pottering about, ‘getting stuff ready for work’. When she went back into the living room, she walked into every parent’s nightmare.
‘He was purple,’ she says. ‘I thought, ‘It’s his heart.’
She got Marcus to the floor and started CPR, screaming for help as she did so. Before long the place was filled with paramedics.
In the hospital, the worst news. Half of a cherry tomato had been found lodged in Marcus’s windpipe. It had taken specialist equipment to remove it. Wendy would not have been able to do it manually, even if she had known it was there.
‘They think he must have fallen asleep when he still had food in his mouth. That’s the only comfort, that there was no struggle.’
Starved of oxygen for too long, Marcus was brain dead.
By the time you read this, Wendy will have boarded a plane to Switzerland with a one-way ticket
Wendy sat with him for five days before the machines were switched off. By then his organs had been taken for transplant.
‘Afterwards, I got a letter from the man who got his heart. He said that thanks to Marcus he was able to play with his kids again.’ Another recipient was a four-year-old child. ‘That was a comfort, but it also ripped at me.’
She looks back on this period with absolute clarity. ‘That’s when I died too, inside. I’m not the same person now as I was. I used to feel things. I’d go to funerals after Marcus died, and I’d feel nothing. It’s why I had to give up work. You can’t be a carer if you don’t care, and I’m sorry, but I don’t. I don’t care about anything any more. I exist. I don’t live.’
Her suicide attempt – via an overdose – came nine months after Marcus died. She planned it, ‘like a wedding’, leaving her affairs in order. She had calculated she’d have 48 hours before anyone noticed her missing, but she didn’t reckon on one of her friends – who knew she was suicidal – raising the alarm after she failed to respond to messages.
The police broke into her home, to be met by the note she’d neatly taped to the bedroom door, warning what lay within.
To hospital, then, stomach pumped. It was touch and go. ‘I was on a ventilator for two weeks. When they took me off it, I couldn’t move, I could only blink yes and no. They told my family I might have locked-in syndrome. I lost the use of my right arm for a while. I still don’t have any feeling in my little finger. I remember coming round and thinking, “I’ve f***ed this up”, and I don’t want to go through that again. That’s why I’ve gone for Pegasos.’
On her release from hospital, she was admitted to a psychiatric ward (‘it was voluntary’). She discharged herself after one night.
‘I thought maybe they are going to give me counselling but the room was like a prison. A bed, a wardrobe with no door on. They wouldn’t let me have my toothbrush and they searched everything. They brought me a dirty beaker with tea in.’
Home she went. Did something go catastrophically wrong with the support system here? It’s impossible to tell. Wendy is dismissive of some of the NHS counsellors she saw in the months and years after this, but praises one. She did have private counselling on top. She was also put on antidepressants.
‘I did try to get better,’ she says, rejecting any suggestion that she had stubbornly decided she was beyond help.
‘But you can take all the pills, you can go to all the counselling in the world – and I did. Ultimately, they can’t help you. They don’t have to live your life, and my life is agony. Even though I’ve got family, I’ve got friends, I’ve got my routines. I go to the park. I’m not lonely, but I still sit at night and I talk to Marcus, and I kiss the box I had made for his ashes and I say ‘goodnight, sunshine’ and I think ‘I don’t want to be in this world without you, Markie’. And I don’t. It’s as simple as that.’
As a final marker of their intense connection in life, when she dies she will be wearing a t-shirt belonging to Marcus because, she says, ‘it still smells of him’.
Wendy first became aware of Pegasos in 2024, when the clinic was in the news after an ITV investigation into Alastair Hamilton’s death, when his mother was publicly calling Pegasos a ‘cowboy clinic’. It was damning publicity – and yet, Wendy says she thought ‘Wow. This is what I need.’ She sent an email asking for more information, and in early 2025, a formal application.
And here we are, over a year on. Since then there has been ‘constant’ back-and-forth with Pegasos with interviews, forms to fill in.
‘They want documentation for everything – all my medical records, details of all the counselling, medication. They know everything.’
All contact with Pegasos has been remote, however, with most communication happening over email or WhatsApp.
What shocks me is that, at the time we speak, there has been no in-person contact – although the final stage will involve a face-to-face assessment in Switzerland with a psychiatrist, to confirm she is of sound mind.
Many will find it also troubling that money has changed hands. Wendy paid £5,000 at the point her application was formalised; and has now settled the balance. This £10,000 is her life savings.
‘But it’s what I want. Some people spend thousands on a handbag. I don’t need a handbag.’
What is this money for? Under Swiss law, it is forbidden to profit from assisted death, and Pegasos is a non-profit organisation. Clients fund the medication, pay for the doctors (there is a rule that they cannot earn more than they would in, say, a hospital), and the funeral costs.
A portion also goes to the Swiss state. Growing concern over taxpayers forking out for ‘death tourism’ has led to an agreement between the clinics and the authorities, so that the police and coroner charges – routine in any death – are met by the clinics.
Pegasos insist that the application process is rigorous. Even within Swiss law, Ruedi Habegger tells me, ‘there is a red line that we cannot cross, otherwise it is not assisted suicide; you could actually call it murder’.
In Wendy’s case, is he confident that he is not straying too close to that line?
‘If the psychiatrist gives us the OK, we are within the legal structures in Switzerland. We are fine.’
Legally fine, but what about morally fine? This is a woman who has decades left to live. This is clearly a much-loved sister, auntie, friend.
‘Look, the coroners who come to us are also the ones who go to the train stations to pick up the bits and pieces from the people who have taken their lives another way. The people who want to decide to take their lives should not have to do it in this horrible way.’
There is huge debate to be had about whether Wendy’s way is ‘neater’, but she is convinced it is.
She tells me she’s cleared out everything at home, charity shop drops have been done, it’s all in hand with her landlord (she rents, so there is no house to sell). Her family will know where to find the letters to them.
Isn’t this selfish, Wendy? ‘I suppose it is,’ she agrees. ‘But it’s what I want. And I’m going to get it, one way or another. I’m sorry if that makes me sound arrogant.’
What would Marcus say? He’d be horrified, surely?
‘I think he’d probably say ‘Get that dog, Mum, buck up your ideas’, but ultimately he would understand.’
It’s not even the case that Wendy is sure she and her son will be reunited. Although she was raised Catholic, she has no time for religion now. ‘I am spiritual, and I do believe Marcus will be waiting for me, but even if he is not, even if there is nothing on the other side, it will be better than this.’
The birds are singing as I walk Wendy to her taxi after our interview. It really is the most beautiful day, we agree.
‘But it’s not enough to make me want to stop here,’ she says. I tell her that the world will be a less beautiful place if she goes through with this. ‘My choice, sweetheart,’ she says.
Postscript: Several weeks later, I receive a call from Wendy to say she has arrived in Switzerland. She says she has had those difficult calls with her family, who – like this newspaper – accept her decision, even if they disagree with it.
Pegasos confirms that she was deemed to have full mental capacity in that final psychiatric assessment, which happened earlier this week.
Founder Ruedi Habegger says: ‘What I can confirm is that four siblings have been informed. They gave their blessings.
‘Wendy is very decided. I saw her at her hotel today, I had a long talk with her and with the psychiatrist that is going to see her a second time before the VAD [voluntary assisted death]. He is very confident that we are doing the right thing letting her go, that we should not stand in her way. She is absolutely not in a depressive state. I’m very experienced in this field. There are no worries with Wendy, none at all.
‘Her family knew this was coming at one point or another. She is happy that she has their blessing. She feels content now, like a weight has been lifted.’
Yesterday, Wendy said: ‘I have told them all and they support me. They are sad, but they know what this has done to me’.
She has told her family that she has given an interview to the Daily Mail, which will be published before she dies.
Her VAD ‘procedure’ is due to happen on Friday.
No money has been paid for this interview.
Pictures by MURRAY SANDERS
– For confidential support, call Samaritans on 116 123, visit samaritans.org or visit https://www.thecalmzone.net/get-support
