At the last minute, Zoë decided to call off her euthanasia. But how do you start over after you’ve said all of your goodbyes?
It was a sunny summer morning when Zoë opened the countdown calendar on her phone. There it was: zero days, seven hours.seven hours. That’s the downside of desperately wanting something: the wait seems to take for ever. To kill some time, she went for a stroll along the canals of Leiden. This will be my last time here, she thought to herself. She sauntered past an organic chip shop, a restaurant and the cafe terrace where she’d had the occasional G&T over the previous few weeks.
Everybody gathered round the bed. Evelien was standing at the head. She had promised Zoë to keep talking to her until after she had been dead a while. Zoë went out into the hospice garden to see her younger brother, who had been waiting there for everything to be over. She smoked a cigarette, went for a stroll with the psychiatrist and, with Evelien, listened to the piano music they had selected for the funeral.
Knowing that she was permitted to die had given Zoë the peace of mind she never thought she’d find. But now the anxiety came hurtling back like a boomerang. She was afraid. Afraid that she wouldn’t be able to pull herself out of this deep hole, but even more afraid of other people’s judgment. What would they make of her U-turn? And what was with the radio silence after her message yesterday?
She was bullied in school and given a whole raft of diagnoses by mental health practitioners. Anxiety disorder, anorexia, depression, borderline personality disorder, you name it. These were eventually whittled down to a single diagnosis: complex post-traumatic stress disorder, caused by severe childhood trauma.
“No way am I going there,” she said. Paul told her what she already knew but didn’t want to hear: she had no choice. Either she would have to go to the emergency ward, or to a homeless shelter. Her psychologist Paul later explained to me that people around her had distanced themselves because they didn’t know what to make of their own emotions. But Zoë felt abandoned. She spent whole days in bed to “manage her attacks”. During those attacks, she shook violently and sometimes even lost consciousness. While outwardly resembling epilepsy, the attacks were her body’s way of releasing emotional tension.
Zoë was dressed in a suit jacket and had painted her nails bright red. “Fake it till you make it,” she said, laughing. I asked whether she was worried that they’d think she was doing well. Stuck next to the note saying “Do I really want this?” was her funeral card, from June. It pictured Zoë standing on the beach in her white dress, the wind in her dark, shoulder-length hair. I looked at her bed, where there was a deflated helium balloon in the shape of a zebra. A gift from another patient on the ward because of the stripy pattern of cuts on Zoë’s arms.She gave me a hug. “All good,” she said softly. “I need a smoke first.
During the drive to Paul, her legs shook nonstop. Withdrawal symptoms, she said. She was down to 25 milligrams of oxazepam – 20 times less than when we had first met four months before. At her feet lay a tote bag with red hearts on it. Inside was a teddy bear, tissues, lavender oil, stress balls, a scarf for tugging at, andthe sweets she popped into her mouth while she was showering to make sure that she stayed in the “now” and didn’t get hauled back into “then”.I called her back at once.
But it didn’t sit well with Melissa, the best friend she had met while receiving treatment as a teenager. “How’s Esther doing?” Melissa asked when the three of us had lunch together, one Sunday in February. Esther was the ostrich on a postcard Melissa had once sent Zoë. The bird had come to symbolise Zoë’s tendency to bury her head in the sand.
“It happens because I’m a master of pretence. People have such high expectations for me so then I start pretending. But there comes a point when I can no longer pull it off …”Was she wrong? Was life not her thing after all? Here she was again, back in this godforsaken clinic. Different room, same story. The photos, the notes with the mottoes and the string of fairy lights – after putting them all up again, she spent all day staring at them from her bed.
A new phase. I wondered if Zoë saw it that way too. I manoeuvred the car through the buildings on the hospital site. Everything was grey and bleak; threadbare curtains in front of the windows, cigarette butts on the pavement. “This may well be phase one of my recovery,” she said. “Everything was always focused on death before. Now I’m doing it for myself. After that, I’ll see what’s what.”
“I have four hours of therapy a day. It’s tough, but I wouldn’t want them to plan any less out of pity, because I don’t need pity.”A month later, she was back in Rotterdam. “I’m doing OK, actually,” she said when we met for an ice-cream. And that felt weird, because it was something she hadn’t experienced in a long while.
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