‘Dead at Noon’ by Gillian Bennett

Gillian Bennett created a website deadatnoon.com to be made public after her death in 2014. In a blog post of 1,683 words, Gillian describes her suffering from dementia and reviews her decision to take her own life at 85. Her post was written both to dispel taboos around discussing death, as well as to advocate for legalizing assisted suicide. Outlining current options for her care under Canadian law, the future costs she would impose on the healthcare system, and her fear of ‘becoming a vegetable’, she concludes that the financial and emotional impact of these options make them undesirable. Throughout the post Gillian Bennett emphasizes the social conditions that influence her choice, referring to Canada’s ageing population as a ‘social and economic disaster in the making’, and her decision to ‘cost Canada as little as possible in my declining years’. In addition to not being a burden on Canada, she also states that it matters to her not to become a burden on her family. At the same time, Gillian stops short of any deeper discussion of what choosing to die means in the context of fearing to become a burden. In our family, she writes, ‘it is recognized that any adult has the right to make her own decision’, offering a thin version of freedom limited to free choice. Bennett died by ingesting drugs, and while her husband was a witness, he did not assist her. Her family has received thousands of emails, and as of March 2024 her blog post has been read half a million times.

When Gillian Bennett died, Canadian law considered it a crime to assist any person wanting to commit suicide. In 2012, the Supreme Court of British Columbia (BC) – the province in which Bennett lived – ruled that the Criminal Code provisions prohibiting assisted suicide in Canada were unconstitutional. The federal government appealed, and the BC Court of Appeal upheld the ban on assisted suicide (2013). However, the BC Civil Liberties Association appealed the 2013 ruling, and the issue of assisted dying was once again going to be discussed in the Canadian Supreme Court. Gillian’s letter aimed to intervene in these debates, and her blog post became emblematic of the idea that medical assistance in dying was desirable for certain individuals. In February 2015, the ban on assisted dying was struck down by the Supreme Court of Canada. Gillian’s post has consistently been cited in parliamentary debates on the legalization and expansion of assisted dying in Canada. For example, her experience was brought up several times in relation to advance directives (asking for MAID by advance directive is currently illegal in Canada) because she advocated an obligatory ‘Living Will’, to be completed by all mentally competent adults over age 50. Bennett took her own life earlier than she would have otherwise wanted to if she had been able to make an advance directive. While Gillian’s wish not to be a burden seems to be a clear, self-reflective position, it is worth reflecting on the potentially gendered implications of her desire – women are often more wary of being a burden than men – and the fact that it might point to the need for better care in Canada. (At one point she writes ‘I do not like hospitals—they are dirty places’.) Both of her children spoke to the pain caused by her death, despite their conviction that it had been their mother’s autonomous choice to die. Her daughter, Sarah, reflects that ‘[e]ven though my mom died painlessly in exactly the way she chose, at the time she chose, knowing that she left the legacy she chose, it’s still unbelievably painful’.

* Addendum on 14 October 2026:

First shared on 18 August 2014 as a four-page blog post with accompanying images, Gillian Bennett’s goodbye letter was subsequently republished in print and online: in 2015, it was featured in the Canadian quarterly Humanist Perspectives and, in 2016, reissued (with different illustrations) by the USA-based magazine Utne Reader. In its original 2014 version, the letter was presented as an interactive text one could navigate via four tabs, each with a picture: two landscape views of Bowen Island in British Columbia, and two photos of the Bennett couple posing behind a cake, holding hands in similar fashion, first at their wedding in 1957 and then in 2014. An ‘About Gillian’ fifth tab (illustrated by a photo of Cosmo the cat) included a biographical note about Bennett and her family, corresponding to a more traditional obituary. By 2015, an ‘Info’ tab was added, describing the widespread impact of the letter, with links to various news articles; and by 2017, also an ‘Audio’ tab, with a recording by audio-book reader Mil Nicholson. Throughout the four pages, the text is organized into 6 sections, with asterisks serving as dividers and cueing thematic shifts: after Bennett’s reasoning about why she is seeking suicide (section A), we read why she believes we should talk more about death (B), Bennett’s assessment of her options as a multiple-choice ethical problem she approaches via elimination (C), her characterization of the ‘Social Welfare State’ as a ‘generational Ponzi scheme’ in the face of an aging society (D), her urging everyone over 50 to make a living will (E), and an explanation of her family’s dilemma of supporting her decision while being unable to assist in her death, lest they face legal consequences (F). The letter closes with an intertextual play on Dylan Thomas’s 1951 poem ‘Do not go gentle into that good night’, which Bennett recasts as ‘Today, now, I go cheerfully and so thankfully into that good night’.

While the World Health Organization (WHO) advises the media not to divulge suicide notes in order to avoid glamourizing suicide, Bennett’s letter resonated with Canadian society at a time when the country was considering legalizing assisted dying (see related entries on the 2012 documentary about Gloria Taylor and on Donald Low’s 2013 video message; see also Antonio Cicero’s 2024 goodbye letter and its impact on Brazilian society). Disregarding the WHO’s recommendation in an opinion piece for The Globe and Mail, Gary Mason called the letter ‘a suicide note that should be read by everyone’. One of the reasons to read it, according to Mason, is that the ‘note is written with the kind of clear-eyed pragmatism that can only be admired’. Indeed, far from glamourizing suicide, Bennett rationalizes it as an equation with but one solution; after weighing in her deteriorating condition and the larger Canadian context, she concludes that living longer would be ‘ludicrous, wasteful and unfair’ – for herself, her family, her caregivers, and the Canadian economy. Bennett’s pragmatic argument was highlighted by philosopher Peter Singer, who argued ‘Bennett’s decision was also ethical because… she was not thinking only of herself’. In an essay for Voices in Bioethics, Joshua Preston underscored the novelty of Bennett’s reasoning, but noted that ‘some have expressed skepticism toward Bennett’s utilitarian argument’. Though the letter’s reception was overwhelmingly positive, even among the early reactions compiled by the Vancouver Sun one reader questioned, ‘Are those with dementia not of value in our society?’ The derogatory metaphors used by Bennett didn’t go unnoticed by researchers and activists. In a 2015 paper, Sally Rivers suggested that Bennett’s desire to avoid becoming an ‘empty husk’, ‘a vegetable’, or a living ‘carcass’ reveals a fear that ‘the loss of the self as we think we know it leads to a meaningless life’. In papers and interviews in 2024 and 2025, Dr. Ewan Goligher, University of Toronto Professor and ruling elder at Christ Church Toronto, emphasized Bennett’s letter as ‘one of the most poignant suicide notes’ he had read, but questioned Bennett’s equating someone suffering from dementia with an ‘empty husk’; he sees a contradiction between claiming people have intrinsic value and consenting to assisted suicide based on someone’s low self-regard. While disability activists have raised questions about the perverse incentives for governments to promote assisted dying as a cheaper alternative to better care and structural reform, Bennett’s pragmatism still resonates as an argument for the right to die that combines autonomy and economics.