My horror, by the widow of suicide clinic businessman
THE wife of the terminally ill businessman who died yesterday at a Swiss suicide clinic said she had struggled to accept his ‘terrifying’ decision. Simon Binner, who had aggressive motor neurone disease, took his own life at the Eternal Spirit centre in Basel after earlier announcing the date of his death on the professional networking site LinkedIn.
His family were at his bedside for his final moments. His stepdaughter Hannah Drury posted a photo of the 57-yearold Cambridge graduate and his wife Debbie Binner on social media with the caption: ‘My beautiful inspirations.’
Before her husband’s death, former Sky News presenter Mrs Binner had told how he decided to kill himself in January this year as he drove home from receiving the diagnosis.
‘I found it horrendous,’ she said. ‘He said first of all he wanted to commit suicide because he was utterly determined that he did want to go through the process of motor neurone disease. He has never ever wavered from that view.
‘He started talking about actively committing suicide, which myself and our family found abhorrent and terrifying. He bought a book about how to do it. That was so shocking and so horrifying, but it did open up a discussion on assisted suicide.’
Mrs Binner, 51, made the comments on a now removed Facebook page. She said she believed strongly in ‘the sanctity of life’, but finally accepted his decision after visiting the Eternal Spirit clinic with her husband and speaking to the woman that ran it.
Mrs Binner said: ‘ She used the term, “Do you want Simon to stay alive so you can have a human pet?” That put me in a very difficult position. Because did I want Simon to stay alive just for me?
‘It makes you really think about someone’s individual right to choose how they live and how they die.’
On the Facebook page Mr Binner, of Purley, Surrey, wrote: ‘I have had a great life and was extremely happy until my diagnosis. I have a loving family and some wonderful friends.’
MPs voted against allowing assisted dying in Britain last month after critics claimed the law would be open to abuse by relatives of vulnerable and elderly people.
A businessman told yesterday how he had tried in vain to persuade his wife to change her decision to die at the Dignitas clinic in Switzerland.
Mother- of- three Rachelle Linz, 50, from Bury, Greater Manchester, had had multiple sclerosis for 17 years and said it had ‘destroyed everything I loved so much about my life’.
After she took a lethal dose of drugs at the clinic with her family by her side, her husband Jonathan, 51, said: ‘I fought with her about it but she was such a strong person that she was not going to let it get to the stage where she could not do anything for herself.’