Suicide is good business that is very bad.

Founded in 1998 by lawyer Ludwig Minelli, Dignitas is a Swiss nonprofit organization, headquartered in Zurich, with a field office in Hanover. Given liberal assisted suicide laws, Dignitas offers a menu of services including administering lethal drugs for paying “members” and providing a room in which to die. In addition, The Washington Post reports: “The organization takes care of the legal and logistical arrangements, from obtaining the drugs to disposing of the body.”[1]

Dignitas charges between $5,000 and $10,000, depending on the level of service. Members come from abroad as well. Of the 1,000 members who have died, approximately 10% have come from the United Kingdom. The Post continues: “If all goes smoothly, members can die the same day they arrive in Switzerland.”

Crucially, members are not required to be terminally ill. Depression is sufficient. Or, as former employee and whistleblower, Soraya Wernli, alleges, one must merely show up and have money. Wernli claims that an 81-year-old woman was persuaded to pay approximately $200,000 for Dignitas services.

In the UK’s Daily Mail, Wernli states: “I don’t know of a single case where they have refused to hand out the drugs.” She continues: “The room where people were to die was often filthy, because Minelli skimped on the cleaning bills. Often there would be shoes or underwear or some other deeply personal item of an earlier victim lying beneath the bed or around the room. It was shameful.”

She recounts her first days at Dignitas.

Minelli said I should empty the sacks onto a long table — they were huge — and sort through everything. I opened one up and was horrified by what was inside. Mobile phones, handbags, ladies’ tights, shoes, spectacles, money, purses, wallets, jewels.

I realised these were possessions which had been left behind by the dead. They had never been returned to family members. Minelli made his patients sign forms saying the possessions were now the property of Dignitas and then sold everything on to pawn and second-hand shops. I felt disgusted.

You see these old photos of people in Nazi death camps sorting through the possessions of those who had been gassed. Well, right then and there, that is how I felt.

Finally, Wernli alleges botched, gruesome deaths, including the 70-hour ordeal of Peter Auhagen. No charges have been filed.

The UK’s Sun adds to the story with the headline, “Dignitas Urns Dumped in Lake.” The urn count, recovered from the bottom of Lake Zurich, was 300.[3]

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[1] Craig Whitlock, “Branching Out to Serve a Growing but Dying Market,” Washington Post (11/1/2005).
[2] Allan Hall, “Cashing in on despair? Suicide clinic Dignitas is a profit obsessed killing machine, claims ex-worker,” Daily Mail (1/25/2009).
[3] Nick Parker, “Dignitas Urns Dumped in Lake,” Sun (4/27/2010).

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In an episode of Little House on the Prairie, titled The Return of Mr. Edwards (Season 6, Episode 8), Mr. Edwards is crippled in a logging accident and wants to die, so he crawls like an animal into the woods while dragging his shotgun through the dirt. He props himself up against a tree and jams the butt of the shotgun into the ground between his legs. He raises the barrel to his head. But now he can’t reach the trigger. It is a regular shotgun with a long barrel and not a coach gun with a shorter barrel, for instance. A coach gun would have worked. But here the barrel is longer than the distance from Mr. Edward’s forehead to his finger. He did not think about this ahead of time. And now the crippled Mr. Edwards has to fumble around in more dirt until he finds a stick with a forked tongue at the end. He tries again. He extends the stick until the tongue licks the trigger. The stick trembles. The shotgun trembles. Mr. Edwards shakes all over. So long cruel world. But what a dangerous method. What a recipe for accident or failure or both.

There are many lessons we can take and numerous insights we can glean from this episode. Actually there are not that many. The problem for Mr. Edwards is one of mis en place, which is to say to be totally prepared in setting and all the implements you will need for suicide so as to reflect and actuate being in a state of mind proper for the task at hand. If you are making tatertot casserole, for instance, you will take your bag of tatertots out of the freezer and set it on a cleared and freshly wiped-down countertop alongside your ground round and one can of cream of mushroom soup. You will have already selected one large onion, yellow or white, to chop or dice depending on preference. The one frying pan you will need will be clean and dry and on the stove, and the baking dish to assemble and finish the casserole at 400° until the tatertots are golden brown will be on the counter just to the right. This depicts in real terms your state of mind. I am ready to cook tatertot casserole, you are saying within and all around, and so you begin. Mr. Edwards was clearly not ready to make tatertot casserole.

The lesson of mis en place can be distilled to another lesson. So a lesson within a lesson. Or a lesson as another lesson. Or just this next lesson, since life is a lesson that you learn when you are through, which is to say that death is the real lesson.