On October 28, two months before his death, the former pope wrote a letter to his biographer Peter Seewald. It shows that since World Youth Day in 2005, he has been “uninterruptedly accompanied” by the sleep medication insomnia. To combat insomnia, his personal physician prescribed powerful sleeping pills. At first they worked, but over time they had less effect.
In addition, the side effects of the drugs added to his condition. For example, there was an incident in 2012 during a state visit to Mexico and Cuba, where he woke up one morning with a bloody handkerchief. “I must have bumped into something in the bathroom or fallen,” he writes.
This was followed by medical advice to reduce the sleeping pills and only to appear in public in the morning when traveling abroad. Then he must have decided that he could no longer maintain his position with those restrictions and he decided to resign.
Joseph Ratzinger died on December 31, 2022 in the cloister in the Vatican Gardens where he had retired. He was 95 at the time. His successor, Francis, is still pope.
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