Another person who evoked this ‘tired of life’ phenomenon was retired French academic, Lisette Nigot. In 2002, Lisette Nigot also took her own life, consuming lethal drugs she had stockpiled over the years. Lisette’s reason for dying? She said she did not want to turn 80.
Lisette Nigot insisted that she had led a good and full life. She said she had always known that she would not want to become ‘too old.’ ‘I do not take to old age very well’ she told film-maker Janine Hosking whose feature documentary Mademoiselle and the Doctor traced the last months of her life.
Mademoiselle Lisette Nigot
In 2002, shortly before her 80th birthday, Lisette Nigot ended her life. Intelligent and lucid to the end, Lisette knew her own mind. A fiercely independent woman, it is not surprising that she expected control in her dying, just as she had in her living.
In Mademoiselle and the Doctor she explained:
‘I don’t like the deterioration of my body ... I don’t like not being able to do the things I used to be able to do ... and I don’t like the discrepancy there is between the mind which remains what it always was, and the body which is sort of physically deteriorating.
Perhaps my mind will go and I would hate that. And certainly my body will go and I wouldn’t be very happy with that either. So I might as well go while the going is good’.
