Son considers whether it’s time for Susie to go
When his 87-year-old mother asked him to buy heroin so she could end her life in a geriatric double suicide with her third husband Stanley, Guy Kennaway decided that the only thing to do was write a book about it.
His mother was not yet ill or infirm, instead she was living in a ‘‘feathered comfortable nest in the European sunshine’’ and was ‘‘amused and tickled’’ by the idea of her son documenting her ‘‘decease plans’’.
It turns out that Susie – Mummy no longer seemed to suit – had form in this area. In the late 1960s, she helped her father’s cancer-stricken secretary to die at home. Her recent internet history included inquiries about Switzerland (dismissed as a destination as it needed a certificate signed by two doctors).
Someone suggests nitrogen, because it is what the CIA uses in political assassinations, and Kennaway muses about the apparent simplicity of smothering her with a pillow.
They are not alone in their planning, virtually everyone he talks to is plotting with friends and family to do away with each other, despite the fact that the United Kingdom’s 1961 Suicide Act, which declared suicide no longer to be a criminal offence, also made assisting a suicide illegal.
Despite this macabre subject matter, Time to Go fairly pulses with life – and, strangely, disarming humour. The book, though, is not for the fainthearted.
It is a tragic farce: as husband Stanley lies on his deathbed worrying that he has yet to finish a 1000-piece model aeroplane, his son Rupert is hooting ‘‘I’ve done some things in my life, but I never thought I’d clean the old man’s todger’’, while Kennaway is wondering if now is the moment to step in and assist his mother with a near simultaneous departure.
At the merciful core of it all is the insistent question: why isn’t choosing how you die a basic human right? What does it mean that, as a society, the best we can hope for is a ‘‘do not resuscitate’’ order and a fatal wheeze of pneumonia?
None of this is pretty. At the beginning of the book, Susie’s eyes ‘‘glisten as her memory reeled back a heavily edited version of her life’’. Towards the end, her ‘‘left eye had a reflective glint like a fish scale, I guessed from a growing cataract’’.
Throughout, Susie remains indomitable. Kennaway describes her as a woman ‘‘of passion, anger and determination’’, widowed at 38 with four children, who is ‘‘pickled in resentments’’ and uses reviewing her will as her ‘‘chief disciplinary tool’’.
The end game is a long one. When do you decide, and can you ever quite agree on the moment to do the deed? Kennaway cites the example of a friend whose grandmother, worn down to ‘‘papery meekness’’ by her husband, was sent home from hospital with a chemical commode. Surely now was the time to go? Yet, after then entering a home, she found a lust for life that had been snuffed out by her marriage. Her relatives were happy to pay any cost for her new happiness.
The process of compassionately ‘‘bumping off’’ Susie proves to be a logistical bore (Kennaway lives in Somerset, she near the Pyrenees), and an ethical bunfight.
Remarkably, it also becomes a bonding process. Their complicated relationship reaches a rapprochement of sorts when he gives her a chapter of her own in the book – she will gain many geriatric fans – and, for the first time in 49 years, the two are able to talk about the sudden death in a car crash of Kennaway’s dad, James. It is a tiny moment, and everything. It is also what makes Time to Go not just a darkly diverting testament to old age, but a remarkably hopeful book. All the more so, as Susie is still alive.