If I read one more article about assisted dying, I’ll throw myself under a bus.
I’m writing this only for my mother who was taken by pancreatic cancer 35 years ago. Actually, she wasn’t so much taken as reeled in, an inch at a time, and my last memories are of a shrunken, mummified figure who no longer recognised me, who yearned for death, who whimpered and cried every time she was moved and whose bodily functions had to be dealt with by my wonderful sister. I remember pleading with the doctor. A little more morphine, please, just to finish it. There was nothing he could do. We talked about suffocating her with a pillow but knew we’d be scarred for life. I adored her. I wanted her to die.
It’s funny, isn’t it, how almost everyone who has had this experience supports assisted dying (Ed Davey is a notable exception) while the majority of those who oppose it are coming from a theoretical, more high-minded starting point. They believe that allowing a change in the law will encourage pensioners less intelligent than themselves to sign their own death certificates the moment they get flu or that dastardly relatives will arrange Agatha Christie-style exits for their elderly aunts. They worry that people they have never met will be worried to death that they have become a burden. They might even expect the angel of the Lord to appear with trumpets and fires.
It is impossible to argue against any of these hypotheses except to note that every cultural change has had its doom merchants. Gay marriage, television, the internet, Big Mac hamburgers, trains, planes and automatic vending machines have all had their Cassandras. Nor am I suggesting that thinkers from Wordsworth to Henry Adams to Pope John Paul II were fools. But, with my mother in mind, I find I have very little sympathy with these collected voices.
Let’s start with Davey, who wrote movingly about the loss of his own mother before expressing his fear: “If we make assisted dying a state-sanctioned option, some people would feel an enormous psychological pressure to take it up even if it’s not what they want.” Who are these people? How many of them are there? How does he know? He doesn’t tell us but concludes: “As a liberal, I of course believe people should be free to make their own decisions about their lives,” even though he argues the exact opposite.
And then there’s Theresa May, a leading opponent of the assisted dying bill in the House of Lords, who reaches to the intellectual heights of James Bond by calling it a “licence to kill”. She adds a novel thought to her assessment of the bill, that it might be used “as a cover-up for mistakes made in hospital”. Even as a fiction writer, I fail to see how this could happen given all the safeguards that are being proposed but, inevitably, she also said she doesn’t believe the safeguards will be enough to prevent the pressure “to extend the scope” of assisted dying, and of course there’s no coming back on that.
I know it’s wrong of me to disparage politicians who have a different view to me or religious leaders who have a belief system that I’ve always found baffling, but the truth is that I feel a rising sense of anger and frustration whenever these rigid views are expressed. Two works of fiction inform my views. There’s the play by Brian Clark that I saw in my late twenties and which has always stayed with me: Whose Life Is It Anyway?. Tom Conti brilliantly played a sculptor, Ken Harrison, who had been left paralysed after a car accident, and I will never forget the energy and moral clarity of his predicament. “I am not an object. I am not something to be just kept alive.” At the end of the play, a judge rules in Ken’s favour. He is discharged from hospital and allowed to die.
Conversely, right now I’m reading Hanif Kureishi’s extraordinary memoir, Shattered (2024), which describes an accident in Rome that left the author in a similar position to Clark’s fictitious sculptor. It’s hardly surprising that suicide crosses his mind. “I think of killing myself by overdosing. It would be a relief.” But by the end of this remarkable – funny, wise, often filthy – book, although he feels “anger and spite” towards the world, he can still find reason to be optimistic. I was left breathless by his courage and by his assertion: “I am in fact more powerful now as a sick person.”
What we have here is a choice; two different ways of interpreting the same awful predicament. All I’m asking for is to be allowed to make that choice for myself if circumstances demand, which, now that I’m 70, could happen all too soon. I suppose there’s always the grim allure of Dignitas in Switzerland to consider but the fact that there’s a side-door for those with enough money to use it only makes me more contemptuous of the current law: an example of what might be called a two-tier bier.
Am I being selfish? Yes. But it’s my death I’m talking about, probably the most intimate moment in my life, and I resent anyone who wants to step in the way and tell me how they believe it has to happen. I’m sure that palliative care is wonderful but at the end of the day, I may decide that it’s not for me. I want my friends and family to remember me as I am now: writing this in glorious Crete, sane and relatively healthy, looking forward to tomorrow… and not like my poor mother. Is that really too much to ask?
[Further reading: Assisted dying’s disgraceful delay]
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Subscribe here to commentThere’s always the option of speeding u p one’s own death by voluntarily stopping eating and drinking(VSED). People have been doing it for ever on the quiet, battling the resistance of medical staff and loving friends and family in denial. Done with good support, it takes a fortnight or so, pain and discomfort can be controlled, gives everyone a chance to rally around, offer love and support and prevent the indignities of a medicalised ‘failure’.
For further info, see:
Voluntarily stopping eating and drinking (VSED) – Compassion in Dying
BMC Med:
. 2017 Dec 27;15:222. doi: 10.1186/s12916-017-0994-2
Advice and care for patients who die by voluntarily stopping eating and drinking is not assisted suicide