When compassion becomes commerce

It must be unspeakably devastating to learn of your mother's death through a WhatsApp message. Not from a doctor, not from a chaplain, not even from an officious administrator behind a hospital desk, but from a Swiss clinic via the same medium through which we order takeaways and share holiday snaps. The clinical brutality of it - the reduction of death to a digital notification - tells us everything we need to know about how the business of dying has evolved in our modern age of manufactured compassion.

Maureen Slough's story should haunt us all. The 58-year-old from Cavan told her family she was taking a short break to Lithuania. Instead, she travelled alone to Switzerland, paid £13,000 to the Pegasos clinic, and ended her life to the soundtrack of Elvis Presley's gospel music. Her daughter Megan discovered this not through any pastoral care or human kindness, but through a message that might as well have been a delivery notification. The ashes arrived by post - no condolence card, just a cremation certificate, as if her mother had been reduced to a mail-order commodity.

This is not the dignified death that advocates of assisted suicide promise us. This is death as a transaction, stripped of ritual, community, and the messy, complicated business of human connection. When we speak of dying with dignity, surely we mean something more than this sterile, commercialised process that treats families as afterthoughts and grief as an administrative inconvenience.

The rise of "suicide tourism" represents one of the most troubling developments in our contemporary attitude toward life and death. Switzerland has become the Dignitas of death - a brand destination where suffering can be efficiently terminated for the right price. But what began as a compassionate response to terminal illness has metastasised into something far more sinister: a system that preys upon the vulnerable, the mentally ill, and those experiencing the ordinary anguish of human existence.

Maureen Slough had a history of mental illness. She had attempted suicide the previous year following the deaths of her two sisters. This is precisely the kind of person who should be receiving intensive care, support, and therapeutic intervention - not clinical assistance in ending her life. Yet Pegasos accepted her application, conducted what they term an "extensive assessment", and proceeded with the termination. One wonders what kind of assessment could possibly conclude that a grieving woman with a history of mental illness and previous suicide attempts was making a rational, irreversible decision.

The clinic's procedures appear to have been woefully inadequate. They claim to have received written permission from Megan Royal, Maureen's daughter, acknowledging and accepting her mother's decision. Megan insists she wrote no such letter. The family believes Maureen forged this documentation and created a fake email address to verify it. If this is true - and the evidence suggests it is - then we are looking at a system so poorly regulated that it can be circumvented by a mentally ill woman determined to end her life.

This is not an isolated incident. The litany of horror stories emerging from Swiss clinics grows longer each month. British teacher Alistair Hamilton, with no diagnosed illness, died at Pegasos in 2023, leaving his family in shock. Anne Canning, a 51-year-old mother battling depression after her son's death, ended her life at the same clinic this year. These are not cases of terminal cancer patients seeking relief from unbearable physical pain. These are stories of people experiencing the kind of psychological suffering that has afflicted humanity since the dawn of consciousness - grief, depression, despair - who have been offered death as a solution rather than hope, healing, or help.

The defenders of assisted suicide will tell us that proper regulation can prevent such abuses. They will argue, with apparently straight faces, that we need to legalise the practice domestically to avoid the horror stories of people travelling abroad. This is rather like suggesting we need to establish our own opium dens to prevent people from travelling to Amsterdam. The problem is not the location of the service but the service itself.

Look at Canada, often held up as the gold standard of regulated assisted dying. Veterans Affairs Canada employees are now routinely suggesting euthanasia to disabled veterans seeking basic accommodation. Christine Gauthier, a Paralympian, was offered assisted suicide when she called to inquire about installing a wheelchair ramp. This is not a bug in the system - it is a feature. Once society accepts that some lives are not worth living, the definitions of "unbearable suffering" and "terminal illness" inevitably expand to include anyone deemed a burden on the healthcare system or society at large.

The slippery slope that critics warned about has proven to be not a slope but a cliff. In the Netherlands, euthanasia is now available for psychiatric conditions, with teenagers as young as 17 able to request death for depression. Belgium allows euthanasia for children with no lower age limit. What began as compassionate relief for the terminally ill has become a conveyor belt to death for the inconvenient, the expensive, and the temporarily hopeless.

Maureen Slough's death speaks to something much larger than one woman's desperate journey to Switzerland. What we're witnessing is the wholesale commercialisation of human despair - suicide repackaged as a lifestyle choice, complete with brochures and price lists. Death has become just another service sector, and in accepting this transformation, we've stepped across a line that may prove impossible to uncross.

The psychological impact on families is devastating and largely unexplored. Megan Royal had welcomed a new baby just weeks before losing her mother - a cruel juxtaposition of life's beginnings and endings. Her grief carries a particular cruelty - this wasn't death arriving uninvited, but her mother deliberately seeking it out while keeping her family in the dark. Mourning someone who chose to go presents an impossible puzzle where the familiar consolations of bereavement offer no comfort when you're left wrestling with feelings of abandonment, self-recrimination, and the gnawing suspicion that you might have changed everything if only you'd known.

There is also the broader societal message we send when we institutionalise suicide as a response to suffering. To the elderly, we say your declining years are a burden. To the disabled, we suggest your lives lack dignity. To the mentally ill, we offer death as therapy. This is not compassion but its opposite - a cold calculation that some lives are simply not worth the trouble of preserving.

The answer to human pain isn't found in perfecting ways to escape it, but in learning how to bear it together. What we desperately need are proper hospices, decent mental health provision, and communities that don't abandon people when they become difficult or expensive. We need to stop treating frailty as a design flaw to be corrected and start recognising it as simply part of what makes us human - something that calls for tenderness, not termination.

The ashes of Maureen Slough arrived in Ireland by post, reduced to a parcel to be signed for like any other delivery. In this grim detail lies the entire moral bankruptcy of the assisted suicide industry in which death has been transformed from a sacred transition into a logistical exercise, from a community event into a private transaction.

We owe it to Maureen Slough, to her grieving family, and to all those who will be tempted by the false promise of the Swiss clinics, to resist this commodification of human despair. The answer to suffering is not death but life - lived with support, dignity, and the knowledge that no matter how dark the valley, we do not walk through it alone.

Compassion requires us to sit with people in their pain, not to offer them a permanent exit from it. Anything else is not mercy but abdication – the abandonment of our most fundamental duty to protect the vulnerable and affirm the irreplaceable value of every human life.