With her customary efficiency, retired nurse Marie de Laet booked the doctor’s appointment for early Friday morning. Ready on the dot, her blonde bob specially styled by a hairdresser for the occasion, she told the medic: ‘You’re ten minutes late,’ as he rushed in the door. A quarter of an hour later, she was dead exactly as she had wished.Marie, 81, had chosen to end her life by lethal injection, with close members of her family at her bedside in a Belgian care home. ‘She was happy that day,’ her son Bart remembered this week. ‘We were happy for her, too. She had peacefully gone to sleep for ever.’Marie was one of several people euthanised by doctors across Belgium on February 1, 2019, and among 2,655 to die the same way that year. ‘She meticulously arranged her death,’ said Bart, a 61-year-old civil servant, who oversees primary schools in the cathedral city of Mechelen where his mother lived.
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