Emma was horrified when her mother, alone and depressed at 88, asked for help to end her life. So why does she now wish she’d agreed?
JIM was so lucky,’ said my mother. Jim was her brother. He was five years younger than her, and had recently died shortly after a stroke at the age of 83.
‘Hmm,’ I responded, knowing where this was going. ‘Let’s do the crossword.’ ‘He died so quickly,’ she said, wistfully. ‘ One across is a cinch,’ I said, focusing determinedly on the newspaper. ‘I wish you’d put a pillow over my head.’ ‘Don’t be silly, Mum,’ I responded, with a lightness I didn’t feel.
‘I mean it. Or take me to Switzerland. Or find me some pills. I can’t go on like this.’
‘It won’t work, Mum. If I get you pills, or take you to Switzerland, or put a pillow over your head, I can be prosecuted for assisting suicide. I could go to prison. And the girls would find it very inconvenient to have to visit me in Brixton nick every weekend.’
My mother was of the pre-war generation. She talked about the most serious things with the insouciance of a character in a Nancy Mitford novel. I found myself doing the same. An air of cynicism offers some protection against pain.
My mother had an extraordinary life. Born in 1920, she was presented at court as a debutante. Her trajectory was clear: marriage to an eligible young chap, a nice house in the Home Counties, a brood of children, plenty of parties and enough servants to make it all easy. But the war knocked her off course.
She became a nurse at Sir Archibald McIndoe’s hospital in East Grinstead, which pioneered plastic surgery for burned airmen. He employed pretty nurses, he said, to give the men something to live for. It wasn’t easy for a young woman to deal with the affections of disfigured and dying men.
After the war, she went to visit family friends in South Africa, and there met my father. He looked like a good catch: the son of the Governor General and a promising, young colonial service officer. But, although she adored him, he didn’t make life easy for her. He became an anti-apartheid activist and they led an itinerant life around Africa.
She was 47 when he died of an obscure blood disease, leaving her with four children — me, an older sister and two older brothers — and no money.
She returned to Britain and did what her Home Counties upbringing had destined her for: she married the Tory MP for Howden and Haltemprice (today David Davis’s East Yorkshire constituency) and settled down to a life of wine-and- cheese evenings and Sunday tennis matches.
SHEand my stepfather had a determinedly sunny approach to life. If you ever asked either of them how a holiday, or a project, or anything at all had gone, the response was unvarying: ‘Marvellous! It was a great success.’
Part of me was infuriated by this — life isn’t always a great success, and it’s hard if you’re never allowed to admit failure — but a larger part appreciated the determination to keep your chin up.
This changed when my stepfather died in 2004 at 91, and my mother left Yorkshire to be nearer her children and grandchildren.
Maybe she was fed up with pretending that everything was marvellous all the time, or maybe it was swapping the lovely Yorkshire landscape for a dark London flat, but nothing seemed to cheer her up.
Her mood was permanently low; when you asked how she was, she inevitably said ‘ghastly’. She was diagnosed with depression and tried various antidepressants, which she said made her feel sick.
She decided she couldn’t cope with independent living and moved into a care home in Oxford, near my sister and one of my brothers.
It was a lovely place, with a huge garden and kind staff, and things improved for a while — maybe because she liked being there, maybe because she found an antidepressant that seemed to suit her.
But, after a while, her mood slipped again. Although her brain was in good order, she often felt sick and her hearing and sight were beginning to fail, so it became harder for her to read, listen to the radio or watch Tv.
It was then that she started to ask me to kill her.
My first reaction was to pretend it wasn’t happening, which was how she had always treated things she found unpleasant. When I sensed that the conversation was going towards death, I would steer it elsewhere.
But she wasn’t going to be put off. We would be talking about something quite neutral, the conversation running along normal lines, when, suddenly, she would crash it into a wall. ‘I wish you’d put a pillow over my head.’
So I stopped pretending it wasn’t happening and talked to her about it. She had, she told me, become a member of, and was giving money to, Dignity In Dying, an organisation that supports assisted suicide for the terminally ill.
She went further: she believed passionately that it should be legal for friends, relations and doctors to give people like her help to die — not just the terminally ill, but people like her who had had enough of life. In a way, these conversations were horrible, because they required me to acknowledge that my beloved mother wanted to leave me and my children.
But, in a way, I also enjoyed them. We were connecting about the one thing she really seemed to care about, and chewing over this most difficult issue with her reminded me that, even though she’d had no education to speak of, even though she was at an age when most
people’s mental capacities are weakening, she was more than a match for me in argument.
Her children and grandchildren loved her, I pointed out, and, if she died, it would cause them pain. So wasn’t it selfish of her to want to kill herself?
Maybe, she replied. But wasn’t it selfish of us to want her to stay alive if she wanted to die?
Fifteen-love. (My mother was a keen tennis player.)
Wasn’t it possible, I said, that if assisted suicide were legalised, mercenary offspring wanting to get their hands on their parents’ money would pressure them into dying?
It was possible, she said — but in places such as Switzerland and Oregon that allow assisted suicide, there haven’t been stories of this happening. And against that possible suffering should be weighed the real suffering of the many more people like her who were being forcibly kept alive. Thirty-love. Then she would lob some arguments at me. How, she would ask, did I think an ageing country was going to go on paying for the care of very old people without bankrupting the Treasury? Forty-love. How, she would ask, could I possibly think it was morally right that the state should spend money on keeping her unwillingly alive, when it didn’t spend enough on giving better life chances to children? Advantage, Mum. I’m a Conservative, she would say. I have been all my life. Conservatives believe in keeping the state out of people’s private lives. So why, when we have a Conservative government, won’t the state let me die? Game. I resisted her arguments for a year or so, because I found it too painful to accept that she should die. But we share the same political instincts, and I knew she was morally right.
And when she started to try to starve herself to death — she twice stopped eating for days, and gave up because it was too painful — I began to wonder if I should do what she wanted.
I broached the matter with my sister, who had been having exactly the same thoughts.
ACOnverSATIOn about whether and how to kill your mother is a strange one to have.
It moved swiftly from the moral (Is this right?) and emotional (Can we bear to do this?) to the practical. Should we take her to Switzerland? no, she was too weak. Stockpile pills? Perhaps, but we didn’t know which ones.
Could we find out on the internet? Maybe, but if anybody were to investigate her death, they’d discover our internet history and suspect us of killing her.
How would we get these pills? Tell lies to our doctors and get them prescribed to us.
But mightn’t whoever certified her death be able to tell she had had an overdose and pin it on us? Maybe they would. And mightn’t it be horribly painful for her? Yes, it might.
Because assisted suicide is illegal, we were frightened and ignorant and did nothing to help her. I now think that was wrong.
I think we should have taken the risk of offering to accompany her to the Dignitas clinic in Switzerland.
But we didn’t, and Mum carried on, frustrated and unhappy, until she was 97, and her body gave up. A few days before Christmas last year, she said to my sister: ‘You know I want to die, don’t you?’ ‘Yes,’ said my sister. ‘But I’m not going to die before Christmas, because it would be such a frightful bore for you all.’
She was true to her word. She lost consciousness shortly after that conversation, resurfacing on Christmas Day, when she was happier than I had seen her for a very long time. She recognised me and smiled.
I played her the Queen’s Christmas message on my iPhone, and she smiled again, said ‘Happy Christmas’ several times, then slipped away.
Since her death, I have had countless conversations with people who have had similar experiences with their own parents. I am now convinced that the law on assisted suicide should change.
I know how painful it is to contemplate helping a loved one die. I’ve been there.
I know that it runs against everybody’s feelings and against many people’s religious beliefs.
But I do believe that, just as we are free to choose how we live, so we should be free to choose how we die.