On 28 March 2024 at around 3.30pm, Holly Warland the Australian-born activist known on Instagram as hollywiththemd died. She was 32 years old.
Holly’s death was announced on 30 March 2024 by her husband, Luke. The woman died after spending more than 48 hours in hospital due to complications from a rhinovirus (cold virus) infection. Despite an initial improvement in her condition, Holly did not want to continue with treatment that involved increasingly powerful drugs and being placed on more machines because she did not want to spend the last moments of her life this way. At 11.30am on 28 March, she decided to stop treatment and ask for palliative treatment to begin. She died at 15:30 surrounded by loved ones. As her husband Luke recalls in the entry, Holly was particularly proud of her euthanasia advocacy and was grateful for the opportunity to “choose a good death”.
Holly Warland suffered from Limb-Girdle Muscular Dystrophy. Several years before her death, she was unable to walk and then also to get out of her bed; she rarely had the strength to leave the house using a wheelchair (a post documenting her exit after a year at home can be found on her Instagram). Her illness also brought her daily pain. She decided to fight for the right to Voluntary Assisted Dying (formerly known as euthanasia) by writing articles and documenting the progression of her illness on social media, especially on Instagram. The photos show both happy moments and the realities of daily life with illness and pain: problems with vomiting, wearing nappies, rashes, breathing problems and the work her husband did: washing, dressing and moving the woman. In photos, she often wore funny T-shirts and ones with the slogan ‘Everything hurts and I’m dying’ and ‘Your thoughts and prayers won’t help me up the stairs’. As she wrote about herself in an article on Bored Panda:” I’m brutally honest and open with my photos, revealing aspects of a disabled person’s life that you don’t often hear about. I’m documenting myself slowly dying from a rare disease to show why euthanasia should be legalized”.
In 2021, her home state of Queensland legalised Voluntary Assisted Dying (with some exceptions, which Holly criticised). Holly was very proud of her contribution to the fight to change the law.
Holly was diagnosed at the age of 11, but led a normal life until she developed symptoms around the age of 20. Initially, she used a wheelchair. She studied psychology and then went on to teach at university and write a PhD in the neuropsychology of autism. Around 2016, Holly was no longer able to work or study and never completed her PhD.
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