"Her new memoir, “On My Own,” recounts her husband’s decision to end his life in June 2014 after his physician was legally barred from helping. Diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 2005, and after two years in an assisted living facility, John Rehm refused food, liquids and medication.
It took 10 days to die, an eternity.
“I rage at a system that would not allow John to be helped toward his own death,” Rehm writes of watching her spouse of 54 years wither away.
[Review: In “On My Own,” Diane Rehm argues for the right to die.]
The experience sparked her advocacy in the right-to-die movement. “I feel the way that John had to die was just totally inexcusable,” she told The Washington Post last year. “It was not right.”
Her public stand, and a commitment to host three dinners for the organization Compassion & Choices, which advocates for legalizing physician-assisted suicide, resulted in an admonishment from a room full of station and NPR brass. Rehm is supposed to moderate news issues, not make them.
“I was annoyed,” Rehm recalls of the experience. “Political issue or not, it’s also an extraordinarily personal one to me because of John.”"
Diane Rehm’s next act: Using her famed voice to fight for the good death - The Washington Post:
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