A powerful exploration of ageing, autonomy, caregiving and the human experience of dying well.

When Oliver Christen’s mother told him she was ready to die, it wasn’t said in panic or despair.

It came after years of watching friends deteriorate in nursing homes, seeing medicine prolong suffering rather than easing it, and witnessing her husband being kept alive by interventions he never wanted.

‘Mum wanted to leave while she still had the ability to choose,’ Oliver says.
In his deeply personal memoir As She Chose, Oliver documents his 85-year-old mother’s thoughtful preparation for death after a lifetime devoted to health, movement, family and independence.

At a time when conversations around wellness and healthy ageing were far less mainstream, Oliver says his mother ‘quietly modelled what it meant to live in a body she respected’.

‘Mum’s commitment to mental fitness was just as strong. She read constantly in multiple languages, took language classes, solved crosswords and memorised poems to keep her mind sharp.’

She was a woman who completed cross-country ski marathons and climbed mountains well into her later years. At 68 she was still mountain biking through her homeland of Switzerland. Later she walked daily through the Ermitage gardens in the country’s north.

But she was increasingly fearful of losing her mobility, independence and dignity.
‘I have had a wonderful life and endured enough operations… But I can no longer push myself,’ she wrote.

Long before her own decline, Oliver’s mother had already been deeply affected by death.

Raised by two doctors who believed life should be prolonged at almost any cost, she quietly supported her twin brother Michel after he rejected invasive experimental cancer treatment and embraced the idea of a more self-determined death.

When Michel died just weeks before his 50th birthday, ‘grief twisted into blame’, and the resulting fracture within the family would stay with Oliver’s mother for the rest of her life.

Oliver says that as someone who studied to be a doctor herself, his mother’s evolving views on ageing, treatment and end-of-life care were shaped not only by personal experience, but by decades spent observing medicine from both sides.
‘Towards the end of her life, she increasingly felt modern healthcare had become so specialised that many doctors had lost their ability to look at a patient holistically.’

As She Chose follows the emotional and philosophical journey of Oliver and his mother as they navigate her final chapter together. Oliver explores what it means to accompany a loved one through the tenderness, uncertainty and emotional complexity of letting go.

Although she initially explored assisted dying through EXIT Switzerland, her final decision took a different path. In the end, she chose to stop eating and drinking — a conscious and legally recognised end-of-life choice sometimes known as voluntary stopping eating and drinking (VSED).

Oliver describes hanging crystals in his mother’s room so rainbows would dance across the walls, as children and grandchildren gathered around her with stories, laughter and final goodbyes.

Over 24 days, Oliver remained by his mother’s side while she slowly let go — listening to the changing rhythm of her breath, navigating the emotional uncertainty of not knowing when the final moment would come, and documenting the strange suspended space between life and death.

In this book, Oliver writes about the waiting. The exhaustion. The fleeting moments of beauty. The quiet intimacy of helping someone leave the world peacefully and on their own terms.