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Laura Henkel
‘I must die more often,’ quipped Laura Henkel, who performed a one-woman Tempest as a farewell show for those closest to her. Photograph: ABC
‘I must die more often,’ quipped Laura Henkel, who performed a one-woman Tempest as a farewell show for those closest to her. Photograph: ABC

Laura Henkel gets her spotlight: the 'bad-arse grandmother' who died on her own terms

This article is more than 3 years old

A new documentary made by her daughter and granddaughter tracks Laura’s decision to die legally in Switzerland – and makes a compelling case for Australia’s laws to change

Laura Henkel had always liked an audience – so when she decided to have an assisted death at the age of 90 in Switzerland, it made sense that she’d want cameras there.

Her acting career had come to an end when she had children in the 1950s, but she remained loud, outspoken, forceful; a huge, all-consuming presence that her granddaughter Sam Lara describes as “a resilient, bad-arse grandmother”.

Both Sam and her mother, Cathy, are film-makers. Laura told them they would follow her from Australia to Switzerland at the end of 2019, to make a documentary about her decision to die. It was not a request. It was a demand.

“It was like, ‘Really, Mum? Do I have to?’” Cathy remembers.

At the very end, Laura had her close up: three cameras on her face. Her last words to her daughter were: “You are going to make a good, good film.”

Laura might have chosen to end her life “in the most wonderful, peaceful way” – with Mozart, champagne and words of love – but she went out in a blaze of glory: a public and controversial death, with her voice still resonating in the powerful two-part documentary she left behind, Laura’s Choice.

“I can still remember how quiet and peaceful the world went, as if it’s just the whole sound of everything just turned off,” Cathy says, of the moment of her mum’s death. “And I stayed in that kind of state for quite some time.”

Vienna was where it all started. Laura had always wanted to go, and finally, in 2016 – at the age of 87 – she arrived there with her granddaughter Sam. She signed up for every walking tour, smoked a joint and drove dodgem cars in Amsterdam along the way.

But the trip was a disaster. Laura had a bad fall in Vienna; she got pneumonia and was hospitalised for six weeks. She had always been fiercely independent, and was a terrible patient who railed against the doctors – and lying prone in Europe, she got a glimpse of her future.

“I think she sort of realised she’d run out of fight for these kind of illnesses,” Cathy says – and when they got back to Australia “she took one good, hard look at her physical state. She just had a profound tiredness, a physical and mental and existential tiredness.”

A year later, in 2017, she summoned Cathy to her home in Ballina, New South Wales, and announced that she had decided to die. She wanted to do it right there and then – but could not persuade Cathy to help her break the law.

Laura Henkel, in a still from Laura’s Choice. Photograph: ABC

The push for voluntary euthanasia to be legalised in Australia has been a long battle. In 1995, the Northern Territory enacted the world’s first voluntary euthanasia legislation, to international controversy and acclaim. More recently, laws have been passed in Victoria, Western Australia and Tasmania, but they come with strict limits: you must be terminally ill, for instance, with a doctor’s approval and six months to live. All of these ruled Laura out.

Laura knew about the abuse of elderly people in care homes, and she didn’t want to be another statistic. She wasn’t terminally ill but she would die soon, and she wanted to be in control of it. “There is no way I can avoid [death],” she says in the film. “I want to do it when I am compos mentis and prepared for it … I am not going to achieve anything more and I don’t want to go into a home.”

And she was going to do it whether her family liked it or not. “My choice was to support her or let her do this alone,” Cathy says. “I decided to support her. And I know I made the right choice.”

Sam describes it as “like a freight train” she couldn’t stop; she didn’t want her indomitable grandma to go. “I struggled to understand how someone could want to end their life. And I think she struggled to understand why I would want to keep her.

“She was able to articulate it very clearly: she didn’t want to disintegrate. She didn’t want to be dependent. ”

‘I struggled to understand how someone could want to end their life. She struggled to understand how I would want to keep her.’ Sam and Laura Henkel. Photograph: ABC

Believing we avoid talking about death as if it might be contagious, Laura called the media to open the conversation. At 89 she became an octogenerian activist, writing a manifesto, launching a forum, and campaigning to help change Australia’s laws. “It is a cause for which I am prepared to die,” she joked.

“She wanted there to be more focus on the elderly voices [in the movement],” Cathy says. “She wanted to propose this notion of a joyous end of life … that you can go [out] with joy, with pizzazz, with swagger. The idea that you can go when you are still glorious.”

If she had access in Australia to the means to choose to die when life became unbearable, Laura believes she might have lasted another five or 10 years. The documentary features moments from her media campaign in 2019, in which she tells a journalist: “You are part of a democratic society. But you don’t have the freedom to die in a dignified manner. Which means you don’t have the most basic of human rights. You have to wait until the bitter end when you are incontinent and blind, maybe wracked with pain, bored silly. You must just suffer on.”

Once she was accepted into the Pegasos Swiss Association clinic in Switzerland and was given the date of her death, the three generations of women went through a kind of reversal of the usual grieving process. Instead of a funeral there was a celebration – a Mad Hatter’s tea party farewell – and Laura was there to hear her own eulogies.

“People came up to her quietly in their own time throughout the evening, and said their private goodbyes, sort of like little one on one meetings with the Queen,” Cathy says. “Afterwards on the drive home she said, ‘I didn’t realise that I meant so much to people.’ I think many people die without realising how much they mean to people.”

‘Many die without realising how much they mean to people’: Laura Henkel at her Mad Hatter’s tea party. Photograph: ABC

The stage had been Laura’s great passion, so Sam organised a theatre for a private performance, where Laura read The Tempest. Laura’s father – a musician, conductor and composer – had left behind a score he had written for Laura that had never seen the light of day; Cathy arranged for it to be performed and recorded for her mum.

“Would I have organised all this if we did not have a set date for her death?” Sam reflects. “It definitely makes the time that you spend with them more kind of vivid, like you’re committing everything to memory. Just these details, like the way that she smelled and the sound of her laugh; those things just sort of become like Technicolor.”

Cathy had always had a “complicated, difficult, challenging” relationship with her mother – but knowing she would soon die, nothing was left unsaid. “The beauty of the way she did this was that we had the opportunity to really talk some of that through,” she says now. “There were some apologies, there was forgiveness and there was a resolution.”

And so to the final one-way journey to Switzerland, as the days count down. In the documentary, you watch Laura take in carol singers in a square, knowing she is seeing everything in the world for the last time. She never wavered; those days were full of laughter. “I must die more often,” she quips at one point.

“She was really very joyous about it, to be able to do it her way,” says Sam. Her mother agrees. “She died with love, giving love and receiving it. It was a good death.”

The first episode of Laura’s Choice airs on the ABC at 8.45pm tonight, followed by the second at 9pm on Wednesday 24 March. You can also watch it on iview

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