Longtime Democrat consultant Hal Malchow will reportedly end his life through assisted suicide in Switzerland on Thursday.
Malchow, who was at the forefront of Al Gore’s successful Senate campaign, has chosen to end his life after being diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 2019.
He opted to die in Switzerland because current laws in the United States only allow euthanasia if a patient only has months to live.
Malchow will travel to Zurich, Switzerland, with his family, where he will have two days to go sightseeing before being administered a fatal dose by a nurse.
“In a sense, Hal Malchow has been planning for this day ever since 1987, when a genetic marker test revealed he was likely to develop Alzheimer’s. At the time, he was barely 35 years old, a hustling political operative who had recently come off managing Al Gore’s first Senate campaign while overcome with worry about his mother’s early descent into dementia,” Politico reported.
“(Around her 50th birthday, she was discovered wandering lost in a parking lot in the Mississippi town where she had lived her whole life.) After his mother’s untimely death, in 1990, Malchow was intent on never letting himself endure the same thing. If he showed symptoms for Alzheimer’s, Malchow resolved at the time, he would take his life before he became too diminished — and became a burden to those around him,” the outlet continued.
