On Feb. 23 at 4:27 a.m. Eastern time my wife, Shanley Rose Crutchfield, of Ellicott City, died at Pegasos, a voluntary assisted dying (VAD) organization, in Basel, Switzerland. She was 35 years old.

Now let me briefly tell you of this beautiful but tortured soul:

Shanley loved two things above all else: dogs and coaching.

Tattooed on her lower leg was the face of her “pibble” (pit bull terrier) of 16 years, Blaze. She carried bags of food and water in the trunk of her car in case she encountered lost or abandoned pups. At the end, she helped care for three dogs of a family friend who was too incapacitated to do so herself.

And for the past decade Shanley dedicated herself to mentoring athletes and at-risk youth. She coached soccer, basketball and track at Parkville High School in Baltimore County and track at Notre Dame of Maryland University.

The outpouring of love and the tributes and testimonies of those she impacted more in life than through any game plan she had on the field has been humbling.

Shanley’s body also betrayed her from birth. With an immune system that was wiped away in childhood, she suffered from chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) for over 20 years, and a combination of thoracic outlet syndrome (TOS) and complex regional pain syndrome (CRPS) the past 10.

Surgery technically corrected the TOS but left her with CRPS, in which nothing attempted alleviated the pain. And her CFS?

As Mark Loveless, former head of the AIDS and ME/CFS Clinic at Oregon Health Sciences University, said during a congressional briefing in 1995 ME/CFS patients “feel effectively the same every day as an AIDS patient feels two months before death. The only difference is that the symptoms can go on for never-ending decades.”

As Hamlet said, “There’s the rub”: never-ending, not terminal.

Shanley did want to live, but as she told me, “Crashing because your body is exhausted from pain just to wake up exhausted is not living.” A permanent chronic illness — one with no cure but only the guarantee that at an unspecified time your body will finally grant you respite, though you’ll never know when — is an undesirable stay of execution.

This is especially true in a country where voluntary assisted dying is solely for those terminally ill, and not in every state (66% of Marylanders support death with dignity legislation, according to a 2020 Gonzales Research & Media Services poll, yet the state is no closer today to passing any).

So in January 2021, unable to fight anymore, Shanley decided to end her life. Though we separated in 2015, I had been her caretaker for three years and a continued support who knew her beliefs and wants like few others. I was the first to join her final journey.

Initially she tried consuming varying amounts of her pain pills, but her tolerance staved off the relief she sought.

I’ll never forget Jan. 24, 2021. She asked me to stay on the phone with her as she placed her head next to her running exhaust pipe in her closed garage. We said “I love you” early in that conversation because with every pause I didn’t know if I’d ever hear her voice again. Unfortunately, it wasn’t meant to be.

By March she was resigned to shooting herself, an abhorrent act she hoped to avoid. Then, in an ironic twist, she received a settlement stemming from a 2018 accident that would allow her to fly overseas for VAD, or her preferred term, MARS (Medically Assisted Rational Suicide). Her body had betrayed her long enough to give her the death she desired.

It was not cheap or readily accessible, however. The VAD alone cost $12,000, and Pegasos is one of the few organizations that doesn’t limit acceptance to a terminal illness.

Shanley was beyond grateful for Pegasos and the care taken to relieve her pain and suffering throughout the whole process. But as a supposed civilized and advanced nation, it is immoral for Americans to have to go to such lengths to die with dignity.

Back when she was actively attempting death, Shanley said, “My exit strategy is a sign of society failing us because I should’ve had a better way to go.”

In her last years she was an avid UFC fan. She likened herself to those retiring by laying their gloves in the ring after their final bout: “I’m done with the fight, but it was a beautiful mess while I was in it, and I put on quite a show in my grueling scrap. I earned my rest.”

You never had to, Shanley, but you definitely did.

Kevin Froehlich (fromoney@gmail.com) is a high school special education department chair in Prince William County Public Schools.