More at Peace With Death Than With Life
Twenty-six-year-old Annalise Holland has faced a reality few people her age could ever imagine: she knows the exact date and time of her death.
In Adelaide, South Australia, she was approved for voluntary assisted dying after years of living with a rare and debilitating illness.
At just 18, Annie was diagnosed with autoimmune autonomic ganglionopathy — a horrific chronic disease that turns her own body into a torture chamber. With AAG, the immune system attacks the nervous system, causing spontaneous episodes of unbearable pain, constant vomiting, and numerous serious complications.
Annie spends most of her life in bed, sometimes up to 17 hours a day. She cannot eat or drink normally and receives nutrition intravenously.
Soon, she will need to have all of her teeth removed because her jawbones are rapidly deteriorating.
In an interview, Annie admitted that she once considered euthanasia unacceptable, but years of living with chronic illness changed her views on a person’s right to decide how and when their life should end.
“I’m not going to live much longer anyway, and if you’ve ever watched someone go through this process, you know it is nothing like the movies. It doesn’t disappear just because you close your eyes.
Being able to have control over your own body, to have autonomy over it, is priceless. And if I cannot change my illness, then I can choose how it affects me.
Last year I developed sepsis and barely survived. I remember that was when I realized that the thought of dying brought me more peace than the thought of surviving.
Because of my illness, I never really had the chance to control anything in my life. Death is the only thing I still have control over — the one thing I can do my own way, on my own terms, for my own peace.
There is still no cure. I simply ran out of time.
There is never enough time.”