Letting my husband die in peace is my last act of love...to save him from a life of torture
IN HER FIRST MAJOR INTERVIEW, WIFE OF PC LOCKED IN A COMA ON HER FIGHT FOR THE RIGHT TO LET HIM GO
AT THE age of 18, Lindsey Briggs knew that Paul Briggs was ‘The One’. Now aged 40, she still thinks he is. Yet the final act of their married life will be when she makes herself his widow. Paul has been in a coma for 18 months since he was knocked off his motorbike. He has shrivelled physically from the rugged, outdoorsy police officer Lindsey adored to a skeletal wreck of a man.
He has shown no sign of regaining full consciousness, his intellect and his emotions trapped in an unreachable shadowland.
Lindsey has just won a heartbreaking legal battle against NHS doctors and Government lawyers. They believe in the sanctity of Paul’s life. Lindsey insists he would want to die.
And while the case of Briggs versus Briggs is one family’s tragedy, it is now also the crux of a national argument about who speaks for someone when they cannot: their family or the state.
Lindsey, who lives on the Wirral with daughter Ella, five, now expects to move her husband to a hospice one day this week. There, he will be allowed to slip away, heavily sedated as food, drink and medical treatments are gradually withdrawn.
Last night, in her first interview since starting the court battle, Lindsey told The Mail on Sunday: ‘This is the last thing I can do for Paul. My husband was an independent man, active, fit, confident and proud of his achievements.
‘He loved being a policeman, he lived the life on and off duty. He was a hands-on father. He enjoyed every day as though it were his last and this is not a life he would have wanted.
‘I don’t want to say goodbye, I don’t want to lose him – widow is such a horrible word. But Paul would not wish to go on with very severe brain damage. I wanted to have hope. Everyone longs for the person they love to be the exception… but Paul is not going to be.
‘He read the Bible, he believed in a better place and he deserves a peaceful death.’
Lindsey’s case was heard in the Court of Protection – a court dedicated to mental health cases which has the same authority as the High Court. Usually, doctors seek the court order which permits a coma victim to die. Since Paul’s care team at Liverpool’s Walton Centre NHS Foundation Trust refused, Lindsey brought her own action, which the trust opposed.
It was described by the judge, Mr Justice Charles, as ‘a central clash of principles’. In human terms, it was also a life or death fight between husband and wife, with Paul, 43, represented by the Official Solicitor, the Government lawyer who acts for people who are unable to act for themselves.
LINDSEY says: ‘Going to court was hard, being cross-examined by the trust’s barristers and the Official Solicitor, having to justify myself, having my motives questioned. I was acting through love, whereas they didn’t know Paul – they’d never met him. ‘They said that since he might not be aware of himself, he might not be distressed by his life. They even brought Ella up, suggesting he could still be a father to her. I had to tell them that this is not what Paul would have wanted.
‘I wish it could have been avoided. But now it is over I am glad permitting Paul to die was not his family’s or his doctors’ decision. It’s been a vigorous, robust process, the arguments tested in court with an independent judge weighing up the evidence and deciding what is in his best interests.’
The judgment was handed down five days before Christmas.
Lindsey admits: ‘I still cry a lot. It’s not for me – it’s for Ella and most of all for Paul, for everything he has lost.
‘I remember a few weeks after the accident, facing three consultants in a hospital room. I thought they were going to discuss organ donation, that they were turning off his life-support. Actually, what they were telling me was worse than that.’ Paul Briggs had been a soldier at 16, celebrated his 18th birthday as a Royal Artillery gunner serving in the Gulf and then continued a family tradition by joining the police in 2004. In Lindsey, PA to a cardiologist, he had a wife to dote on and, with the surprise arrival of Ella in 2011, a miracle baby conceived against the odds after a long struggle to conceive.
He was passionate about his family, travel, motorbikes and food.
Lindsey says: ‘I wish Paul had not been resuscitated after the accident. In films, people survive and recover – in real life there is no Hollywood outcome. As a society, we have become scared of death yet for Paul and for me, for Ella, for his family, that would have been the least worst option.
‘He can’t be some medical experiment or a legal file on a desk. He would consider living like this to be torture. If there had been a document, a statement of his wishes, his death would have been non-negotiable. But Paul didn’t have one. Who does? You think as a wife you’ll be able to speak for your husband, that you can be their voice. It’s shocking to find you’re not.’
Crucially, Lindsey was clear about Paul’s wishes even though they were not codified. As a traffic officer, he had witnessed decapitations, serious burns and devastating head injuries.
She says: ‘He used to talk about the horrible things he’d seen at accidents – the dead and the victims who ended up brain-damaged in the centre where he is now. Paul visited them and said, in those situations, it would have been kinder if they had just died at the scene.’
He reiterated this opinion when Formula 1 ace Michael Schumacher was left in a coma after a skiing accident three years ago.
It was July 3, 2015, as Paul was driving to work for a night shift that he was knocked off his bike on the Birkenhead flyover. He was hit by 26-year-old novice driver Chelsea Rowe, who was later jailed for 12 months for causing injury by dangerous driving, and released after just six months. She had been on the wrong side of the road.
Rowe has never apologised in person to Paul, yet Lindsey, in court to see her sentenced, remains forgiving rather than vindictive. ‘I think she should say sorry to him – he would have expected it. It’s most disappointing that she hasn’t.
‘I would still like to meet her in person – I would tell her that I bear her no ill-will and that I want her to be able to get on with her life.’
Rowe’s head-on collision with Paul left him in a deep coma and with multiple injuries. For six months, Lindsey visited her husband in hospital daily.
‘I would spend the day with him, come home, care for Ella and then stay up late Googling ways of stimulating someone in a coma.
‘I talked to him, played his favourite music – Paul liked everything from Motley Crue to classical – lit candles, turned on the TV, touched him with different textures.
‘He could breathe for himself but beyond that there was nothing. His eyes would open but there was nobody there. Sometimes, I’d think I could see terror in them. You could grip his hand and his reflexes would make it grip yours back, though he can’t do that now.
‘I took Ella a couple of times but she was too scared to look at him
or touch him. She would just cling to me. It was cruel for both of them. She was confused at the start. She’d see a police car and ask, “Daddy?” Now she points at the stars and asks why he hasn’t gone to heaven yet. She knows he’s never coming home.’
PAUL’S official diagnosis is that he is ‘minimally conscious’. Doctors believe at best he may one day become conscious enough to know pleasure and pain. For them, this is enough to believe his life is of value and that it should be prolonged and preserved with treatment and rehabilitation.
To Lindsey, and to Paul’s mother Jan and brother Jeff, this is semantics – Paul will never attain any kind life he would have considered worth living prior to his accident.
A year ago, Lindsey hired a mental health advocate to help her persuade the Walton Centre of this. Last August, she instructed a solicitor to take the matter to court.
The four-day hearing took place in Manchester in November and December, with Lindsey granted non-means-tested legal aid for the £50,000 legal bill.
She says: ‘I had to bring it to a close, to do it for Paul. It is my responsibility to ensure he is remembered for who he was, not what he has become.’
The couple met through mutual friends in Chester when she was 18 and he was 22. Lindsey had no hesitation in saying ‘Yes’ when her boyfriend went down on one knee at the Eiffel Tower in 1997.
‘I knew he was going to. He was no good at keeping secrets,’ she smiles. They married in 2000.
They were distraught to discover they could not start a family and suffered a failed round of IVF and a miscarriage before Ella was born in 2011.
‘I did a pregnancy test as a standard requirement before starting a second cycle of IVF and it was positive. I shouted for Paul – he simply wouldn’t believe me.
‘That moment was one of the very happiest of our marriage.’
Family photos from seaside holidays and woodland hikes show how much they enjoyed being parents. The week before Paul’s crash was spent preparing Ella for primary school the following September – the proud father watching as she pirouetted around the house in her new red and grey uniform.
Lindsey says: ‘The day Paul was injured, he’d picked Ella up from pre-school and taken her to the park to feed the ducks. I’d cooked chicken and baked potatoes for dinner. Then he went for a shower and put on his motorbike leathers.
‘He always gave Ella and me a huge hug and a kiss before he left for work – he knew that any shift could be his last. Ella sometimes used to run away to make him chase her. She did so that night but he caught her for a cuddle. She was such a daddy’s girl.’
Paul left for work on his beloved Yamaha bike at 8pm. With Ella watching TV, Lindsey went out to tidy up toys in the garden. She’d just come back in when the doorbell rang. ‘I knew something had happened to Paul. I just knew.’
Through the frosted glass panels of her front door, she could see the high-viz jackets of his traffic police colleagues. They gave her the bare, brutal details of the crash and rushed her to hospital to be with her husband. It was the start of a cruel journey which is now coming to a close. She still visits Paul every week as part of a rota drawn up by family and friends. Off-duty Merseyside officers sit at his bedside and read to him too. But her priority is Ella, whose early struggles at school and anxious episodes made Lindsey realise she was needed at home.
WHEN Paul moves from hospital care to end-of-life care, she will go as often a as she can in the hope she will be by his side when he finally dies. She has not yet planned his funeral and cannot imagine ever marrying again.
Lindsey does not blame his doctors – she accepts the need for matters of life and death to be properly, justly, weighed. ‘They are only human,’ she says.
If she hopes for anything, it is that more people will write living wills setting out their wishes should they be, like Paul, unable to express them. She has found out the most painful way possible that ‘next of kin’ has no meaning in this context.
In his December 20 judgment, Mr Justice Charles agreed that given his current condition and bleak prognosis, Paul can be allowed to die.
The judge described him as a ‘man of courage’. Yet the truly brave one is Lindsey, the loyal wife who must make this her last act of love.