Born to a British father and an Irish mother, he was raised in Somerset. His education was slender because of a broken home followed by World War II, when many English schools were in chaos, finally leaving at the age of 15, when he became a messenger boy for the Yorkshire Post. In a 30-year journalistic career Humphry worked and wrote for the Bristol Evening World, the Manchester Evening News, the Daily Mail, the Sunday Times and, lastly, the Los Angeles Times.
Personal life
His first wife, Jean Humphry, ended her life on 29 March 1975, in The Cotswolds with her husband at her side, with an intentional overdose of medication; she was suffering from terminal breast cancer. He told that story from his perspective in the best-selling Jean's Way. Derek and Jean Humphry had three sons, the youngest one an adoptee. Humphry wrote the 1991 suicide handbook, Final Exit. From 1993 onwards Humphry has been president of the Euthanasia Research & Guidance Organization, and chairs the advisory board of the new Final Exit Network. His marriage to his next wife, Ann Wickett, an American and a co-founder of the Hemlock Society, ended in 1989 when she filed for divorce; they had no children. Ann Wickett committed suicide, at the age of 49 on 2 October 1991, during a recurrence of depression. She had been battling breast cancer, but the cancer was in remission and she was not considered "terminally ill". In her suicide note, she claimed that Humphry was a "killer" and that his first wife, Jean, had died of suffocation. He denied these allegations as groundless. In early 1990 Humphry married Gretchen Crocker, youngest daughter of an Oregon farming family.
Affiliations
Humphry is an advisor to the World Federation of Right to Die Societies by virtue of his past presidency and in appreciation of his 26 years of involvement with that organization. Since it was founded in 2004, Humphry has been an adviser to the Final Exit Network. After four members of the organization were accused in Georgia of assisting a suicide he launched the Final Exit Liberty Fund which paid most of their legal costs. In 2014 Derek Humphry was given the World Federation of Right To Die Societies "Lifetime Achievement Award" for 'contributing so much, so long and so courageously to our right to a peaceful death. The award was presented by world president Faye Girsh at the 20th international conference in Chicago on 9/19/2014. It is the first time this award has been made.
Books and publications
Humphry was newsletter editor for the World Federation of Right to Die Societies for a number of years. As of 2016, the paperback Final Exit was in print in English, Spanish and Italian. It has sold more than one million copies in twelve languages since 1991. In April 2007 the editors and book critics of USA Today selected Final Exit as one of the most memorable 25 books of the last quarter century. In 2017 he published his life story, Good Life, Good Death: The Memoir of a Right To Die Pioneer
