The Champion Who Picked a Date to Die

By Andrew Keh, Photographs and additional reporting by Lynsey Addario, The New York Times, December 6, 2019

DIEST, Belgium — Champagne flutes were hastily unpacked from boxes, filled to their brims and passed around the room. Dozens of people stood around inside Marieke Vervoort’s cramped apartment, unsure of what to say or do. This was a celebration, Vervoort had assured her guests. But it did not feel like one.

Eleven years earlier, Vervoort had obtained the paperwork required to undergo doctor-assisted euthanasia. Since her teenage years she had been battling a degenerative muscle disease that stole away the use of her legs, stripped her of her independence, and caused her agonizing, unrelenting pain. The paperwork had returned some sense of control. Under Belgian law, she was free to end her life anytime she chose.

But instead, she just went on with it — seized it with new vigor, even. Within a few years she reached uncharted heights in her career as a wheelchair sprinter, winning a gold medal at the Paralympics. She became a celebrity at home and abroad, appearing in the pages of international magazines and newspapers, sitting for interviews on television shows. She traveled the world telling her life story, unspooling it as an inspirational narrative.

But she still had that paperwork. And now, after more than a decade of uncertainty and pain and joy, of opening her private life to friends and strangers and reporters, of inspiring others, of vexing them, of wishing for the end of her life and at the same time fearing it, Vervoort had invited her loved ones to her home for the most heart-wrenching of reasons:

In three days, she had an appointment to die.