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Remembering Ken Marshall Watson – 9/7/1921 – 8/18/2023

Ken Watson was a Hemlock Society board member for several years specializing in filming our meetings, interviewing and often hosting our guests, and helping with all things video. His apartment in the Vi Retirement Community was a mini-recording studio with a green screen, teleprompter, lights, cameras, and plenty of action.

On August 18, Ken died peacefully, the natural way, over two days, with ten of us around him in his penthouse apartment, including his two young great-grandsons who affectionately patted his head and face, even after he stopped breathing.

Even though he was on a first-name basis with the leaders of our movement, like Derek Humphrey, Dick MacDonald, Rob Jonquierre – many of whom he hosted in his apartment – he chose to die “naturally” with hospice care. Just a month before, our very good friend, Len, chose to use the End-of-Life Option Act, and we said a loving goodbye to him. Ken chose to continue life, dying two weeks short of his 102nd birthday.

Ken was a smart but modest, soft-spoken physicist and a member of the National Academy of Science. His PhD was in Electrical Engineering and Physics. He was a professor for 35 years at UC Berkley, having done his post-doc training with Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller and worked under several presidents. After retiring from Berkley, he became an Emeritus Professor of Physical Oceanography at UCSD Scripps Institute of Oceanography. Ken is the author of several books and papers, all of which are unintelligible to the average reader.

Ken and his wife moved to the Vi Retirement Community 21 years ago; sadly, she died there in 2015. Most of his loving family is in San Diego except one son and his wife (who has become a Hemlock member) in Sedona. Ken developed an interest in making movies and helping out technically with projects at the Vi, which is how I met him 9 years ago and lured him into Hemlock activities as well as travel and ethnic restaurants. He is a man who truly had a good life and a good death, even though he chose to end it the old-fashioned way.

-Faye Girsh, his companion