Nobody should be denied right to end their suffering

KEITH Woods’ column (GCB, 28/11/18) touched me deeply, bringing back mixed emotions and a few tears.

I watched my father’s slow death from asbestosis and share that story here because he and I believed in allowing a person to die with dignity.

I stood looking at a shadow, gaunt, hollowed eye sockets and stick-like arms, the skin pale and clammy. When his eyes opened, they radiated pain and the attempt of a smile was clearly forced to give us some comfort.

Tears overwhelmed me, I could no longer hold them back. This was my father lying before me.

Johannus Antonius Andreaus Janssen, my father, had been a chief engineer in the Dutch Merchant Marines. He was a decorated war hero, one of those targeted by the German U-boat packs as they shipped cargoes of munitions and supplies across the Atlantic to support our land forces.

In those days, the pipes in the steam rooms were insulated with a mixture of plaster of Paris and asbestos. As the insulation deteriorated, it was ground off and replaced. Little did they know that hidden in the resulting dust cloud was another silent enemy, a slow and lingering death, asbestosis or mesothelioma.

My father, like many in the war, had seen horrendous things, people who suffered needlessly when all hope had gone. He was a believer in euthanasia having watched men being torn apart by sharks screaming to be shot rather than face such a terrible death.

It took many years for the silent killer to strike. We had moved to Australia in 1950 and it was now 1965, the year I watched a man I thought a giant reduced to a shadow racked with pain and left to suffer despite the morphine that addled his sharp brain.

When he finally passed, much to my relief, I refused to see him in his open coffin, choosing to remember the man he was.

As I write this, tears flow once again – for the memory and anguish is as vivid as it was that day.

No one should have to suffer this. We enshrine the individual’s rights and yet deny them the right to end their suffering. Who are we to judge? It is not us lying there in pain. We may not have had a choice in coming into this world, but we should have the choice to leave it when all hope is lost.

Those final memories have never left me. They never will. The needless pain, my father’s loss of dignity forced upon him because his choice to leave this world under his own terms was denied him. Our government has a chance to change this by allowing compassion to guide them.

For those who have suffered and for those who will, may it choose for the rights of the individual.