When the end came
The right to choose to die has been a divisive topic in New Zealand for decades. Campaigners who kept the issue alive celebrated a hard-won victory in Parliament’s Grand Hall on Friday. Kelly Dennett was there.
In the 1980s a terminally ill woman living in a retirement village wrote two letters, one to her family letting them know she’d paid the TV licence and another to the matron who’d find her body, apologising.
More than 30 years later, on Friday morning, retiree Olive Mitchell listened to a man on National Radio confidently saying the end of life choice referendum wouldn’t pass, and then, despite her bad back, the End of Life Choice Society campaigner made the trek from the Ka¯piti Coast to Parliament’s Grand Hall with a positive feeling that that man was wrong.
Two days earlier, on Wednesday, Bobbie Carroll had been in her Piha garden, weeding. How was she? ‘‘Still alive.’’ The next day brought bad news. She had a year left. On the Friday she left the coastal Auckland community and flew to Wellington to finish what she’d started.
Five and a half years after her daughter Lecretia Seales took an extraordinary High Court case not far from here, Shirley Seales walked into Parliament too scared to be too sure, worried she would jinx things. But the night before, ACT deputy leader Brooke van Velden was sipping bubbles with a smile. She was quietly confident that after decades of campaigners trying to shift the dial, her party had finally sealed the deal. The polls looked good.
And so it would all end here, those years of campaigning, in a not austere, turquoise-walled, wooden-floored room in the belly of Parliament, with glasses of bubbles at the door and a heavy rug to cushion the grief and exquisite relief. The ACT party was holding the floor. The guest speakers brought the stories of their activism to the podium, while tourists enjoying a parliamentary tour craned their necks through the door.
The room waited.
In 1995, when Wanganui MP Cam Campion was dying of bowel cancer, the 52-year-old threw the last of his energy into battle. One night he phoned then Hawke’s Bay MP Michael Laws and said, ‘‘Michael, I’m dying of cancer. I’m on morphine. I’m in pain. I can see where this is headed.’’
Laws was spurred into action and his Death with Dignity Bill was the first of its kind to travel through Parliament. To a packed room on a Friday afternoon in 2020, in a pin-striped too-large suit, Laws reflected that ‘‘the way we die is just as important as the way we live’’.
‘‘I knew the bill would fail, there was an inevitability about it because death was, and still is, the final taboo subject. Its inevitability makes us fearful and often wilfully blind. That first step was always going to be the hardest.’’
Sitting in the front row listening was trailblazer Dame Margaret Sparrow, who thought the euthanasia advocates were pioneers. Next to her was Frank Dungey in a blue suit, inconspicuous in a sea of letter writers, politicians, activists, society members and the sick, the founding member of the Voluntary Euthanasia Society, who’d been at it for 43 years.
It’s now the End of Life Choice Society, and Ann David, a member of 11 years, nods to Frank. When he began publicly activating for euthanasia, his public servant career had to be put on hold. You couldn’t speak out about it. ‘‘Now society is much freer.’’
Months before, David had been nervous. The misinformation campaign that suggested disabled people and the elderly would be killed off under the act was pervasive. Extraordinary. ‘‘It’s very difficult for people to know what’s truth and what’s not.’’ She thinks in the early days the depth of public approval for euthanasia wasn’t understood, and public perception had changed.
Suzy Austen agrees. She walked into Parliament on Friday afternoon excited, glowing. Within the hour she would be weeping. The 69-year-old was in 2018 convicted and fined for importing the suicide drug pentobarbitone, and found not guilty of aiding the suicide of elderly Wellingtonian Annemarie Treadwell. Years on, Austen unabashedly admits she routinely engages unsuspecting strangers in the topic by finding a way to bring it up.
‘‘All the work that people have done, there are so many people that have just devoted their last 10 years working, working, working. I think they’re heroes, or heroines. They are giving something. Their greatest legacy that they could leave to New Zealand is to be part of a change of law. They’re not doing it for themselves.’’
After half an hour, van Velden had introduced all the battlers. Michael Laws. Maryan Street. Shirley Seales. Dr Mary Panko. There was less than five minutes until the results were in. Empty bubbles glasses sat under chairs. ACT leader David Seymour looked tense.
In 1995, Laws’ bill applied to people with a medically verified illness, people who had made living wills with instructions for their treatment in the event of serious accidents or terminal illness, and people with a medically verified incurable illness whose gross suffering or permanent impairment affected the quality of their life.
This year’s End of Life Choice Act is perhaps not what early advocates had in mind but is a coup nonetheless; people with a terminal illness, likely with less than six months to live, can ask a medical practitioner to help hasten their death. Seymour introduced the bill in 2017, two years after the death of high-profile lawyer Lecretia Seales, who had taken her fight to die all the way to the High Court. That year she unsuccessfully asked it to clarify the law so she had the option of a doctor’s assistance to die if her suffering become intolerable.
People eligible for the act must have significant and ongoing decline in physical capability, and experience unbearable suffering that cannot be eased in a manner that the person finds tolerable, and they must be able to make an informed decision. The act won’t apply to people who have a seriously compromised quality of life but aren’t dying, and people can’t plan to hasten their death while healthy by writing it into their wills.
The 1995 bill failed by 61 votes to 29, and NZ First MP Peter Brown, whose wife had died of cancer, launched another bill with the same name in 2002. That too was defeated, 60-58. In 2012, Street launched another bill, but withdrew it ahead of the election the following year. In 2019 Seymour’s passed 69-51. The final decision about whether it became law fell in the hands of New Zealanders in a referendum.
Half a world away in London, Lecretia Seales’ sister’s alarm went off at 1am, while in New York, Matt Vickers – Lecretia’s widower – lit a candle and logged into Zoom. Van Velden gave nothing away as she read the results off her phone to a room packed with people with hope.
Seymour would later that night recall the feeling in the room in the second after as being one of relief. New Zealanders voted for compassion, the room would say afterwards, over and over. Sixtyfive per cent of voters – not including the special vote count – voted to make law the End of Life Choice Bill. The cheers went up first, and then the hands. The tears were just as quick.
Shunning the microphone, Bobbie Carroll told the room she had blood cancer, and she was going to die. She’d fought for the right to marry her partner of 33 years, but when campaigners asked her to get onboard with euthanasia after Seales’ death, she said, ‘no thanks’. Her days were numbered, and she wanted to spend them with her family. ‘‘But then I got to thinking, you selfish twit, if you don’t represent what Lecretia wanted, who the f... else is?’’
In the audience Shirley Seales laughed, and thought, ‘‘if Lecretia were here, she would think New Zealanders have done the right thing’’.
Seymour said that when he woke up on Friday he was confident, but at his celebrations that afternoon the enormity of the occasion struck him as he talked to a woman whose mother had been talking about the right to die since the 50s. Seymour’s own mother had died from cancer when he was 24.
By the evening the calls with congratulations to Olive Mitchell came thick and fast. She felt grateful, thinking of her relative who had died a lonely death more than 30 years beforehand. She began volunteering for the society as a result.
‘‘I think she would have welcomed this law.’’