Cancer fight over for right-to-die campaigner

PERTH: Alison Napier told loved ones to ‘be proud’

A Perth writer who fought for a change in law to allow terminally ill Scots the right to plan their own deaths has lost her battle with cancer.

Alison Napier, pictured, penned her own obituary and told friends: “Be sad for a while, but be proud too.”

The 61-year-old died after six days in a Tayside hospice. Her partner Susan Price, whom she married in May, believes Alison would have preferred to have died at home.

Alison had worked with campaign group Dignity in Dying and considered travelling to the Dignitas clinic in Switzerland.

Susan said: “Alison’s desire was to have a good death, good for everyone around her.

“On many levels, it was a good death – but it went on for three days and that is a long time to have to witness that.”

Alison’s funeral – which she planned herself – takes place at Perth Crematorium this afternoon.

The following are extracts from Alison’s self-penned obituary. The full version can be found on The Courier’s website.

The young Alison was born in Ceres in Fife and had a carefree time just running about and going to the progressive local primary school, swinging like a mini Tarzan from the highest branches of a tree, turning her mother’s hair prematurely grey and climbing up the hay bales on Mr Melville’s farm and falling off and breaking a front tooth. Again.

And Judith, her longsuffering little sister Judith, well Judith may have different recollections. Alison admits that she probably shouldn’t have taken your dolls and hanged them by the neck from the washing line, or put your favourite felt pens through father’s school pencil sharpener, and she knows now that only letting you borrow one roller skate at a time was not a nice thing to do. She sends belated apologies.

Alison got a sociology degree from Aberdeen University in 1983, and developed an interest in feminism and gay politics.

She went to Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp, and worked as a health trainer in remote parts of Nicaragua.

Returning to Britain, she started at a “squat” in Islington, before travelling to Bristol to work at a psychiatric hospital.

She became an aunt to young Franny – “the most amazing child” – and enrolled in a Creative Writing course in Exeter University.

In 2009, while living in a “windswept caravan” in Largs, she wrote her novel that would go on to be shortlisted for the Dundee International Book Prize.

She met her soulmate and future partner Susan Price.

Alison searched for Susan across the million impossible strands of the internet and found her, and Susan found Alison too, and after six months of a courtship of emails and phone-calls they met and realised that they had indeed found their soulmates.

They had eight years together. They wanted a hundred more. They hadn’t finished having adventures. But eight years of loving and being loved unconditionally, that is more than many dream of.