“I HAD TO WATCH MY DAUGHTER D!E…” – A grieving mother has shared the unimaginable pain of watching her teenage daughter’s final days after the young girl, who had struggled with severe mental suffering, was granted euthanasia under Dutch law.
Omar and Cissy Dekker never gave up hope during the nearly four years their only child, Iris, spent on the waiting list for euthanasia in the Netherlands.
Iris was just 13 when she developed severe depression and functional neurological disorder (FND), a condition that caused chronic headaches and, following a seizure, left her unable to walk for two years.
After two suicide attempts, repeated hospitalisations and years of relentless mental anguish that left her with ‘no feelings’, Iris made the firm decision that she wanted to die through the country’s legal euthanasia process.
But after years of waiting and a succession of treatments that her parents desperately hoped would help – only to watch her sink deeper into what her father described as a ‘black hole’ – Iris chose a different legal path.
On March 1 of this year, the 19-year-old died five days before her 20th birthday, through a process known as voluntary stopping of eating and drinking (VSED).
Omar and Cissy now speak to me from Bergen op Zoom in the Netherlands, exactly four months after their daughter passed away.
‘From the day she was born, Iris was always curious,’ Cissy tells me. ‘She wanted to know how everything worked. She’d ask, “What is this? Why do birds fly?” She was intelligent and wanted to understand the world.’
Omar adds that their daughter was a ‘sensitive’ girl who enjoyed reading, drawing and climbing on rocks. She was an avid tennis player and enjoyed athletics.
But when she reached secondary school at age 13, her once careless and happy life changed drastically after she began experiencing debilitating panic attacks along with headaches and stomach pain.
+9
View gallery
Omar (C) and Cissy (L) Dekker never gave up hope during the nearly four years their only child, Iris (R), spent on the waiting list for euthanasia
+9
View gallery
Omar says that Iris was a ‘sensitive’ girl who enjoyed reading, drawing and climbing on rocks
+9
View gallery
The effect of severe stress and depression on her brain led the teenager to have a seizure, leaving her wheelchair bound
TRENDING
October 7 hostage says Gaza medics reattached her FOOT at 90 degrees
4.6k viewing now
My passionate five-year love affair with Prince Edward
457.4k viewing now
Abandoned house where Rod Hull fell to his death during Man Utd game
5.8k viewing now
At first, Iris persevered on a cocktail of painkillers and antidepressants, but then she started staying home from school after the symptoms became too much to bear. Her mental health was also rapidly declining.
‘She started spending more time in her bedroom,’ Omar recounts, ‘She had less contact with us and with other people. She became quieter, stayed in her own space and listened to music. She also began having trouble sleeping.’
The effect of severe stress and depression on her brain led the teenager to have a seizure, her father says, leaving her wheelchair bound.
Thus began the cycle of the next several years. Omar and Cissy – both trained nurses in Holland’s healthcare system – were now nursing their own daughter, who required 24-hour care.
‘In the last four years, we may have left the house without her two or three times,’ Cissy says. It put a strain on their relationship as a couple, too.
Their anxiety only intensified when Iris was 15 and attempted to take her own life twice within the span of just a few months.
‘We were at a friend’s birthday party when Iris called Omar crying,’ Cissy says. ‘She had tried to hang herself, but she fell, and it didn’t work.’
After the first attempt, her parents tried their hardest to keep Iris safe. She slept with Cissy in bed for months, and the pair made their daughter promise she would come to them if she was feeling suicidal.
But a few months later, Iris tried to take her own life again, this time slitting her wrists. Omar found her and rushed her to the hospital, where doctors stitched her wounds.
‘Iris described feeling like she was in a black hole. She had no feelings – no joy, no sadness. There was nothing to look forward to and nothing to look back on,’ Omar says.
The teenager told her parents: ‘If an hour passes for you, it feels like four or five hours for me.’
Every day felt unbearably long, and she dreaded the thought of another day beginning.
A week after her suicide attempt, she told her psychologist she no longer wanted to live and raised the possibility of euthanasia for the first time.
‘When Iris’s therapist told me that she wanted to discuss euthanasia, it completely blew my mind,’ Cissy says. ‘I thought, “Are you crazy? Why?”
‘My initial reaction was very emotional. But over time, I came to understand that, for Iris, it could be a way of keeping herself safe from attempting suicide again.’
Omar saw it as a window of hope – some time for things to improve.
‘It meant there was still time for treatment, whereas if she took her own life, there wouldn’t be. It was still early in her illness, and I knew there were many medications and treatments she would have to try before euthanasia could even be considered,’ he said.
‘I thought, “It’s a long road before euthanasia is approved, and that gives us time for her to get better”.’
Iris was 16 when she applied for euthanasia at the Dutch Euthanasia Expertise Centre.
Under Dutch law, children aged 16 and over can request euthanasia without parental consent, although their parents must be consulted.
Before a request can be approved, patients are also required to undergo extensive treatment to determine whether their suffering can be alleviated.
A month after applying, Iris was referred to the Erasmus University Medical Centre in Rotterdam, where she underwent months of psychotherapy and cycled through multiple medications.
But despite Omar and Cissy’s hopes, her condition never improved.
‘There was never a point where we felt anything was truly helping,’ Omar tells me. ‘She went through the entire depression treatment protocol – around seven evidence-based treatments – but none of them made a real difference.
‘Our biggest hope was electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), but unfortunately, that didn’t help either.’
After the ECT treatment failed, Omar took his daughter on a trip to Scotland for a few weeks to see if exposing her to a ‘calmer’ environment would help encourage her to keep fighting.
But after two weeks in Scotland, Iris told her father she had made her decision.
‘This was the last thing I wanted to try,’ she said. ‘But it’s not going to help either. I just want to die. I don’t want to experience another summer. I don’t want to reach my 20th birthday.’
+9
View gallery
After just two weeks in Scotland, Iris told her father she had reached her decision
+9
View gallery
Iris was 16 when she applied for euthanasia at the Dutch Euthanasia Expertise Centre
Iris, however, was still on the euthanasia waiting list with no approval in sight. When Omar called the centre, he was told his daughter was at the top of the list. But they couldn’t give him a date.
‘”At the top of the list” could mean six months, a year, two weeks – nobody knows,’ Omar says.
Iris began researching other legal ways to end her life, eventually coming across VSED.
Under the process, patients are admitted to a hospice and, under medical supervision, either gradually reduce their food and fluid intake or stop eating and drinking abruptly. Iris chose the latter.
Omar says he was ‘shocked’ at first when Iris brought up her plan. ‘I thought it was going to be a terrible way to die,’ he says.
He later supported Iris’s decision, but the desperate father still clung to the hope that the process itself might awaken her instinct to survive.
‘Part of me thought it would work for Iris because she had an incredibly strong will. But another part of me hoped that something instinctive or biological would happen – that when it became so difficult, she would suddenly want to live.
‘I compared it to drowning. When you’re underwater, your body has an instinct to come up for air. I hoped that after four or five days without food or water, that same instinct to survive would kick in. But it never did.’
Once the process was approved and a hospice agreed to admit Iris to begin the VSED, the teenager regained a bit of her spark that had been dimmed over the past few years.
‘She felt relieved. She knew it was going to happen, and she was finally allowed to go through with it,’ Omar says.
‘She became more relaxed, not because she wanted to live, but because she knew the end was in sight.’
Cissy adds: ‘We [also] felt a sense of relief. We were relieved that she was finally able to do what she wanted to do.’
In the weeks leading up to her admission, Iris spent time with family and friends. She enjoyed a girls’ night with her mother and went shopping with her father for comfortable pyjamas for the hospice, quietly preparing to say goodbye to the life she no longer wanted.
On February 12, 2026, Iris checked into the facility. Her mother says that the second she walked through those doors, the expression on her face changed.
‘For the last four years, her eyes had been dark. There was no sparkle in them – just an empty look,’ Cissy says. ‘At the hospice, the sparkle came back. The colour returned to her eyes.’
The family of three spent the next days together, laughing, crying and having deep conversations about what the Dekkers’ future would look like without their daughter.
Iris also hugged her parents for the first time in years.
‘For the last four years, we never touched her unless she wanted us to. But at the hospice, she opened her arms and said, “Come here.” We were able to hold her again,’ Cissy says.
Although she had stopped eating and drinking, Iris developed an unexpected craving for apple juice – a drink she had never particularly liked before.
Cissy brought her a bottle, and Iris gently swished the juice around her mouth before spitting it out.
‘She was so happy,’ her mother recalls. ‘She was lying in bed, smiling at the taste of the apple juice.’
While she still felt well enough to joke and chat with her parents, Iris gave her father two ‘missions in life’.
The first, Omar tells me, was to ‘share her story,’ and the second was to ‘keep living and not be sad for the rest of my life.’
Cissy recalls one memory that has stayed in her mind from those weeks in hospice.
‘One night, Iris wanted to go outside. The sky was completely clear, and you could see all the stars.
‘By then, she was physically very weak, so she leaned against me. We stood there together at four o’clock in the morning, looking up at the stars. We didn’t say anything, but I knew all was well.’
After 14 days without food or water, Iris’s body had begun to shut down. There was no turning back.
+9
View gallery
Iris enjoyed a girls’ night with her mother in the weeks leading up to her hospice admission
+9
View gallery
The family of three spent the next days together, laughing, crying and having deep conversations
A doctor came to her bedside and told her, ‘You made it,’ before beginning palliative sedation to keep her comfortable in her final days.
On March 1, as Omar and Cissy sat beside her, they played Frank Sinatra on a record player they had brought from home.
Surrounded by her parents and the music she loved, Iris took her final breaths. She died at 5.13pm to the sound of Sinatra’s Come Fly With Me.
Tears well in Omar and Cissy’s eyes as they remember the heartbreaking moment they said goodbye to their only child.
‘She passed away very peacefully. You could see it on her face – she looked peaceful, and she even had a smile. It was all very calm,’ Omar says.
‘She reminded me a little of Snow White. She had such pale skin and a white face. Her face was completely untouched – there were no marks, no signs of struggle.’
Two weeks after Iris died, the pair took a trip to Helensburgh, Scotland, the town that Iris had previously visited with her parents.
It was there that Omar says he allowed himself to break down for the first time after a whirlwind two weeks organising his daughter’s funeral and filling out paperwork.
‘As we turned the corner into the square in Helensburgh, I could almost see her sitting there again. I just broke down. It was the first moment that everything really hit me.’
After five years of being full-time carers for their daughter, the Dekkers now find themselves with endless time on their hands.
‘The question is, what do you do with that time when she’s no longer here? We’re still trying to work that out,’ Omar says.
Cissy adds: ‘Before, one of us always had to stay alert. We were constantly worried that she might try to take her own life, or have a seizure. That constant tension is gone now. The atmosphere at home is completely different.’
‘There were periods when the pressure put some distance between us. But over the last four or five months, we’ve become much closer again. We went through the whole process together.
‘It was a journey, with ups and downs, struggles and tension, but we always managed it together. When one of us wasn’t able to cope, the other would step in. We carried each other through it.’
Worried the euthanasia clinic would call after Iris’s death to say she had finally been approved, Omar contacted them himself to let them know she had died and needed to be removed from the register. They had no idea she had passed away.
‘I asked them what would have happened if I hadn’t called to tell them Iris had died. They said they would have tried calling her a few times. When there was no answer, they would have called me, because I’m listed as her first emergency contact,’ he said.
‘I told them that would have been incredibly difficult – for me or for any parent or partner who had already lost someone to suicide or through voluntary stopping of eating and drinking.’
Because of privacy rules, the centre is not automatically informed when someone on its waiting list dies.
Omar believes that this should change, so grieving families are not faced with the distress of receiving a call about an appointment or approval after their loved one has already died.
As for those who judge Iris’s decision or oppose physician-assisted dying on principle, Omar says the issue is far more nuanced than many realise.
+9
View gallery
As for those who judge Iris’s decision or oppose physician-assisted dying on principle, Omar says the issue is far more nuanced than many realise
+9
View gallery
On her funeral card, Iris wrote a message for the people she had left behind (Pictured: The funeral card which reads ‘Be kind, sincere, and honest with each other’ in Dutch)
He believes severe psychiatric illness can be just as debilitating as a physical disease, and that people who are mentally capable of making informed decisions deserve the right to choose.
‘I’m a medical teacher, and we’re taught to take a holistic view – that the body and mind work together. But when it comes to psychiatry and euthanasia, people see it differently.
‘If someone has cancer and they’ve gone through every available treatment, most people in the Netherlands accept euthanasia if several doctors agree they’re not going to get better.
‘But if someone has a psychiatric illness, and five doctors all agree that the illness isn’t going away and the person isn’t going to recover, people are much more judgmental.
‘I think that’s something we need to have a much deeper discussion about.’
Iris was buried on her 20th birthday – March 6. Before her death, she planned the entire funeral, picking out the coffin, the flowers and the music she wanted at the ceremony.
At the end of the service, the 160 guests in attendance left small boxes of apple juice by her grave to remember the moment of joy she had experienced in hospice.
On her funeral card, Iris wrote a message for the people she had left behind.
‘She told people to be kind, love one another, care for each other, and always be honest. That’s what she wanted to leave behind for the world,’ Omar says.
