‘My family had to watch our mother disappear. She begged to die every single day. No-one should say – no you can’t die’
“I NEVER thought I would be campaigning for this at all – it never would have crossed my mind until my mum,” says Tracey Taylor, a married mother-of-three from Glenrothes, Fife who launched the Flora’s Voice campaign in the wake of her mother’s agonising final months suffering from multiple sclerosis.
Her mother, Flora
Lormier, had lived and coped with MS for some 40 years until her condition deteriorated in 2015. Taylor, 51, said: “In the beginning, she was fine. She had a happy life, she got on with it, but one by one things started to disappear from her. Her legs, and her arms, and her fingers – everything stopped working until eventually she was paralysed from the neck down and couldn’t do anything for herself.
“She would have to ask to get her head scratched, her nose scratched, anything like that, and eventually it got to the stage where she was bedridden because she couldn’t sit at all any more. She kept having spasms, and there wasn’t a thing doctors could do. Nothing.
“She was on painkillers but they weren’t working anymore because your body gets used to it after so many years. She was on the strongest painkillers you can get but she was in pain all the time.
“She cried all the time. It was hard watching her. Our whole family had to sit and watch this woman disappear to nothing. She begged to die every single day.”
Flora was 68 when she died on December 12 last year, but Taylor said she had “had enough” during the final two years and spent the last 15 months in bed. Her family have released pictures of Flora’s last months in order to show the unnecessary suffering that the terminally ill go through as the end approaches. Taylor said the experience has left both herself and her father, as Flora’s primary carers, traumatised. She said: “I shouldn’t remember my mum that way. I have nightmares.
“Even my dad is still struggling. Since I started the Flora Facebook page, I get hundreds of messages all the time from people in the same situation so this is not a one-off case.
“Everyone should have the choice. It’s our own bodies.
“What gives someone else the right to say ‘no you can’t die’. Women don’t have to ask for the right to have a baby, you’re not told how you have to live your life, but you’re told ‘no, you can’t die’.
“Why should we have to go out of the country [to the Dignitas clinic in Switzerland]? Even if we had the money, by the time my mum wanted to she couldn’t travel. We’d have to have done it before, and she wasn’t ready then, so what do you do?”