Terminally ill woman Brittany Maynard, advocate of death with dignity laws, has ended her life

Terminally ill woman Brittany Maynard, advocate of death with dignity laws, has ended her life
(Image credit: Twitter.com/CBSNews)

Brittany Maynard, who announced she would end her life on Nov. 1 after being diagnosed with stage 4 glioblastoma, died Saturday. She was 29.

"Goodbye to all my dear friends and family that I love," Maynard wrote on Facebook. "Today is the day I have chosen to pass away with dignity in the face of my terminal illness, this terrible brain cancer that has taken so much from me...but would have taken so much more."

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Maynard's doctors found a brain tumor in January, but after removing as much as they could, it grew back even bigger. Doctors gave her about six months to live, and after doing her own research, Maynard decided against undergoing chemotherapy or radiation. "For people to argue against this choice for sick people really seems evil to me," she told People. "They try to mix it up with suicide and that's really unfair, because there's not a single part of my that wants to die. But I am dying."

Maynard is survived by her husband, Dan Diaz, mother Debbie Ziegler, and stepfather Gary Holmes.

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Catherine Garcia, The Week US

Catherine Garcia has worked as a senior writer at The Week since 2014. Her writing and reporting have appeared in Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times, Wirecutter, NBC News and "The Book of Jezebel," among others. She's a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.