Otmar Wörner wanted to die for the first time when he was 14 years old.

During his confirmation class he had fallen in love with a girl who didn't want anything to do with him.

From today's perspective, that sounds golden, back then it was deadly serious.

Wörner was convinced that life without this girl is pointless.

"I was close to leaving this life because it was terrible that she didn't want to look at me," says Wörner.

He wanted to hang himself with a rope, but rejected the plan.

Justus Bender

Editor in the politics of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sunday newspaper.

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The decades passed.

Wörner was lucky not to have killed himself because of a girl, he married another woman and is still with her today, 60 years later.

He became a father and worked as a managing director of a food trading company.

Wörner was always the boss, which means he had his affairs under control.

It is difficult for him to leave something to fate at the end of his life.

Wörner wants to decide for himself when, where and how he dies.

That's his firm will ever since he saw his peers die.

In the Hessian village where he grew up, there were nine boys born in 1934. All of them are dead. One died in his sleep, one had pneumonia, one had testicular cancer, one had a femoral neck fracture, and the list goes on.

Many suffered terribly, especially at the end.

Wörner is still unable to talk about his best, “only” friend without his voice failing him.

Best friend had prostate cancer and battled it for ten years.

Seven were "reasonable", as Wörner says, the last three years the cancer was in the brain, in the spinal cord, in the lungs.

It meant "pain, pain, pain".

The last time they saw each other, he got into bed with his friend because nothing else worked, their heads were close together, on the same pillow, they both cried.

"He was lucky, he still had faith in God, I don't have that anymore.

It enabled him to endure it for so long without committing suicide.” Like his best friend, Wörner doesn't want to waste away, and he doesn't want to be dependent on others either.

He knew an entrepreneur who was blind.

And another who was paraplegic.

Wörner doesn't want to live like that.

"If something happens to me now, I know that my life is over.

I see a lot of people being pushed across the street.

I can not imagine that.

I'm 87, so I don't have to try my best to stay alive."

"These are all miserable scenarios."

For Wörner, the optimal, the good death is one in which he goes to bed at night and never wakes up in the morning.

His mother was allowed to die like this, at the age of 95.

And when Wörner comes to the point where he has cancer or something else, he wants to do without the very last few weeks when life no longer seems worth living to him.

Wörner has been thinking about dying for twenty years.

An old school friend of Wörner's had diabetes and therefore had access to insulin.

He always reserved a bottle for Wörner so he didn't have to go up a tower or in front of the railway.

An insulin overdose is fatal.

Before the friend died, he showed his children the insulin bottle and said: "This is for Otmar." But this last bottle didn't last forever, it's spoiled now.

Wörner would have concerns about other methods, for example an overdose of aspirin and then bleeding to death internally.

"These are all such misery scenarios." He would prefer a regulation like that in Switzerland.

Where someone sets up the apparatus for you and you only have to press the button, then the lethal injection comes, clean, without pain.