UK Couple Commits Suicide After 61 Years Of Marriage

86-year-old retired Royal Navy Commander, David Brittain, and his 84-year-old wife, Bridget Brittain, carried out a suicide pact in their Yelverton home in England after 61 years of marriage.

According to Daily Mail, the couple were members of Exit, a group that helps people plan to take their own lives, and had openly talked about suicide for five years but had not mentioned it for 18 months to avoid causing upset.

The couple’s physical health deteriorated but they wanted to remain together and not end up in residential care, a source revealed at the couple’s inquest.

Susan Keeling and Judith Thompson, the couple’s grown-up daughters, said at the inquest that the”very private couple” attended church regularly, did charity work, and let local people use the swimming pool in their garden.

They added that their parents met when their mother was 17 and their father was 19 and tied the knot in 1954. The couple, who shared a love of sailing boats, gardening and sport, were married for 61 years and spent 40 years living at their beloved home in Yelverton, West Devon, England, their daughters said.

“There is some consolation they are still together,” one of the daughters stated, adding that they were “proud people who relied on each other” before their death.

Thompson continued, “Our father said, ‘I will leave this house in a coffin’. We did not want them to do it. They had done what they said they would do. It was a massive shock.”

She suggested that her father had perhaps fallen, and when their mother could not lift him up, they had decided to end their lives because they did not want to go into the NHS care system.

According to the assistant coroner for Exeter and Devon, John Tomalin, the couple had put out cushions “to make themselves comfortable” before ending their lives in the living room of their £750,000 home in Dartmoor.

Tomalin recorded a verdict of suicide, saying, “It would appear both were willing participants in the act that ended their lives.”

The couple’s cleaner, Neryce Bladdon, who discovered the couple’s bodies in their living room, stated that they had left a note on the porch telling her not to enter the house, and raise the alarm.

“They both wanted to die,” Bladdon said.

Photo credit: Alamy