July 22, 2015

The life and death of Rogi Wieg

Rogi Wieg, a well known Dutch poet, died by voluntary euthanasia in Amsterdam on Wednesday night.

Throughout his life he suffered from serious depression and anxiety. He frequently had long spells in psychiatric institutions where he received electroshock therapy. He attempted suicide three times. His request for euthanasia was granted on the basis of ‘unbearable psychic suffering’ but he also suffered numerous debilitating physical symptoms particularly in the last years of his life – possibly as a side effect of all the different medications he had taken over many years.

In 2003 on a tour to promote his book Kameraad scheermes (2003) he told audiences : “Most people who say they want to die, don’t actually want to be dead. They just don’t want the life that they have.”

After being told by doctors that he was ‘uitbehandeld’ (no further treatment available), he began the process of requesting euthanasia. In an extraordinary moving and frank interview with Wim Brands conducted last winter and shown after his death by the VPRO on Dutch TV (in Dutch – no subtitles) Rogi Wieg speaks about the death of his father – also through voluntary euthanasia – his own fear of death and his sadness about death being the only thing he had left to look forward to. He said that even now he still frequently feels like he would like to end his suffering by taking his own life and not waiting for the outcome of his application for euthanasia, which he expects to be successful. But he was determined to see the process to its conclusion – to do otherwise would be like a defeat.

He talks about his disappointments, four years after the death of his father he finds he no longer thinks of him as someone he loves – and he is very negative about his mother whom he calls a narcissist. His condition, by his own admission, is rooted in a long standing fear of death – and, I would suggest, an existential crisis that has continued haunted him for most of his life. He explored every therapeutic avenue available without resolution, including four years of psychoanalysis, many and varied medications and electroshock therapy.

Rogi Wieg was fortunate in only one sense: He was a citizen of a country where he had a choice about ending his suffering in a humane way.

“I don’t believe in God,” he once wrote, “But I hope He believes in me.”

Rogi Wieg was 54.

Dr.Johannes Klabbers