Choose how I die or watch Jeremy Kyle: I know which I prefer
MY HUSBAND has been stockpiling pentobarbital – the knockout drops vets use to send pets to the happy hunting grounds – for when the time comes. Me, I have a pact with my chum Phoebe up the road. If I go totes gaga or become profoundly disabled, she’s promised to come over and put a pillow over my head. I will return the favour. Suboptimal, I know. As Phoebe said last week: ‘The trouble is if you write about our pillow-pact on Sunday and then you die, everyone will know it’s me and I’ll go to prison.’ Even though, as of last week, a majority of doctors and 82 per cent of the public are in favour of assisted dying (in the most recent poll), she’s right: it’s a crime.
To me it’s the law that’s wrong here, not all our well-laid plans.
This is quite simple, then: the law must change, otherwise poor Phoebe could wind up doing time (up to 14 years). Well, I don’t want to end up a dribbling vegetable in a care home in front of The Jeremy Kyle Show . I strongly don’t see why I should, and I don’t see why anyone else should, not against their wishes.
Still, as statute stands, that cruel, careless and costly fate could so easily await us. My mother-in-law is 96 and has advanced Alzheimer’s. My mother, 74, has Parkinson’s, as do two of her sisters. I admit I’m frightened: but am I also being selfish and wrong in wanting to pop my clogs while mobile and compos mentis, preferably in the middle of a vigorous seniors’ mixed doubles match of midmorning tennis? I don’t think so.
Last week I spoke to a French woman, Marie, whose father, a surgeon, had chosen to end his life in a Belgian hospital ( assisted dying is legal in some European countries and some US states).
He’d had severe back pain from the age of 82, and had registered an interest in assisted dying (the system has endless safeguards and is highly regulated) the requisite five years in advance. When, aged 87, he faced a five-hour back operation with a predicted poor outcome ( more pain, and the prospect of a wheelchair), he decided to take the road less travelled instead. ‘We discussed it as a family,’ Marie said.
‘ The two doctors were nominated. He was given a month to change his mind. He got support and comfort that we were OK with it and he could die peacefully, with all his faculties intact, without being muddled by morphine.’
Two years later she has no regrets. ‘He went with dignity and without pain,’ she says. The evidence from THE Fifty Shades series of soft-porn flicks are – if you break it down – one of the least transgressive franchises in film history. There’s a ‘meet-cute’ between white heterosexuals. They start dating, indulge in some light spanking and designer bondage, and become ‘exclusive’ (Fifty Shades Of Grey, Fifty Shades Darker). In the latest, Fifty Shades Freed, Ana and Christian get married (left), she gets pregnant and they live happily ever after. OK, the couple have unfeasible amounts of sex after all this time, but still: not so much kinky as Disney. jurisdictions that allow assisted dying seem to confirm the system is not being abused. It even complements palliative care. Assisted dying in the US state of Oregon, for example, has been available for 20 years, and is offered as one of the commonplace choices on the end-of-life menu at hospices.
WERE it not for the opposition of a few hundred members of the British Medical Association (the BMA decided agin assisted dying back in 2006) and MPs (who kicked out a right-to-die Bill in 2015), this country could also move peacefully towards a more humane approach to the inevitable, and spare poor Phoebe a prison sentence when my ‘time’ comes.
The NHS website’s slogan is Your Health, Your Choices. I’ve chosen my life. I’ve elected, as it happens, to donate my brain to the Queen Square Brain Bank to aid research into the neurodegenerative diseases afflicting beloved and close family members. I just don’t see why I can’t choose my death too.