A campaigner and author who wrote a bestselling memoir about her life with dementia has died after making a final plea for a change in the law to allow assisted dying.
Wendy Mitchell, 68, said in a letter published posthumously on her blog that she had decided to stop eating and drinking after suffering a fall at her home. Her daughters Sarah and Gemma confirmed in a post on social media that she had died peacefully early on Thursday morning.
Mitchell, from Yorkshire, was diagnosed with early-onset dementia at the age of 58 in 2014. She became an ambassador for the Alzheimer’s Society and wrote The Sunday Times bestsellers Somebody I Used to Know (2018) and What I Wish People Knew About Dementia (2022).
In her final book One Last Thing, reviewed in the Sunday Times last June, Mitchell argued in favour of assisted dying.
She repeated that plea in her final post on her Which Me Am I Today? blog. After describing dementia as “a cruel disease that plays tricks on your very existence”, Mitchell wrote: “If you want to do something for me, please campaign for assisted dying to be law here.”
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Her final post begins: “If you’re reading this, it means this has probably been posted by my daughters as I’ve sadly died.
“In the end I died simply by deciding not to eat or drink any more. The last cuppa tea … my final hug in a mug, the hardest thing to let go of, much harder than the food I never craved …”
She said that she had initially wanted to choose a “dignified death” at Dignitas in Switzerland. However, after injuring her wrists and spine in an accidental fall at her home, she said “the only choice open to me was to stop eating and drinking”.
Mitchell added: “I decided this was my time to end this cruel life dementia had thrust upon me.
“I wasn’t depressed, I wasn’t forced or cajoled in any way whatsoever, it was solely down to my choice. I was ready.
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“You may or may not agree with what I’ve done, how and when I’ve chosen to leave this world, but the decision was totally mine.”
Mitchell ended her post saying that “dementia didn’t play the winning card — I did”.
