Death of an Author

In January 2015, I headed to the West Coast on a research trip for a book I was writing about the right to die. My lengthy interview list included John Hofsess, a journalist turned activist. He had been a key player back in the early 1990s, helping Sue Rodriguez challenge the Criminal Code’s blanket prohibition against assisting a suicide, all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada. They had a public falling-out before her death in 1994, and he had been mostly under the radar since then, eventually moving to subsidized housing in Victoria. There was another right-to-die case from British Columbia before Canada’s highest court in 2015, and I wanted to connect the dots between the two challenges.

The Toronto friend who supplied an email address for Hofsess was unsure that he was even alive because for years he had claimed to be dying. The address worked, but Hofsess declined my interview request, pleading ill health, and suggested I look up Eike-Henner Kluge, an...