Why my friend’s shocking suicide convinced me I want the chance to kill myself with dignity
An electrifying – and deeply personal – intervention into the Debate about assisted suicide by one of our theatrical knights
Her partner was treated as a suspect and questioned by police until 6am
IT WAS a simple email that changed me for ever. As a stage and screen actor, I have performed the words of some of our greatest writers, but a message from one of my oldest friends – a boy with whom I shared happy schooldays in the West Riding of Yorkshire – truly altered my view of life and death.
It had been many months since we had spoken, and I was looking forward to hearing David Pinder’s news. He is a retired Army Major who saw active service in the Falklands and was a Nato boss during the siege of Sarajevo.
David always has updates from my home town of Mirfield where he and his partner Gillian served as mayor and mayoress. But what he told me left me profoundly shocked and moved in a way I will never forget. It must have been hard for my dear friend to write of how Gillian, a wonderful and doughty woman of 53 suffering the later stages of terminal cancer, had died.
Lying in their bed, almost too ill to move, she had taped herself into a plastic dry cleaning bag after convincing him to take their beloved dog for a walk, and suffocated. So desperate was she to be free of a world that had initially misdiagnosed her cancer, and then refused her the chance to die in dignity, that she had to die alone and in terrible pain.
I have never spoken of this before, because I believed some matters are too personal to share. But the growing urgency of the assisted dying debate has convinced me that I must share this story – and I share it with David’s blessing. I want to show the very deep suffering that so many families like David’s are forced to endure.
It was his experience that led me to become a spokesman for this movement, and more importantly, to decide that I, too, want the chance to die with dignity.
I have, for many years, taken the whole issue of planning for the future very seriously. And, at the age of 73, I have to consider the fact of my own mortality. I have come to see planning for death is simply another aspect of planning for life. It is part of a process of making sure the people you love will be taken care of, emotionally as well as practically.
I have a drawn up a ‘living will’, a document that gives specific instructions to doctors to withhold care from me in certain circumstances. Sadly, because of the law in this land, it cannot include anything to do with taking one’s own life or my wish for an assisted death should I become terribly ill. If I could do that, I would. And I am sure Gillian would have done so too. As it was, she had an official certificate asking that she should not be resuscitated in the event of a cardiac arrest.
The medical profession had nothing else to offer her, even with a tumour so large and painful that she looked eight months’ pregnant. The whole process was traumatic.
It started with the doctors who told Gillian – who was very health conscious, had regular check-ups and always believed anything untoward would be caught – that she was being ‘neurotic’ and simply undergoing the menopause when she complained of pains in her abdomen. And it ended at the hospice where the noise was so loud she couldn’t get any rest.
Also suffering from tinnitus, Gillian bore her diagnosis for uterine cancer with incredible stoicism. But by the time it had finally been identified – in July 2010 – the cancer had spread to her liver, lungs, kidneys, spine and hips. They advised that she may want to go home and enjoy her final months with David and her beloved cavalier spaniel. As the pain grew, and this hugely vivacious, popular woman who had run her own dog-grooming business lost the ability to look after herself, she and David talked about the possibility of flying to Dignitas, the assisted suicide clinic in Switzerland, but they didn’t have the money.
In the end, on New Year’s Day three years ago, she convinced David to go and see some friends. She took an overdose of pills and David is in no doubt that she did this deliberately in an attempt to ensure that he could in no way be implicated in her death.
But, sensing something was wrong, David came home early and found her lying on the floor, still alive but only just. He sat with her all night at the hospital praying she would not wake, simply because he knew how excruciating she found her life.
A fit and healthy women, who rode horses and watched what she ate, Gillian did survive. She might have amazed the doctors, but she was bitterly disappointed, knowing she was condemned to endure more pain from the tumours that had finally reached her brain. As Gillian had previously made what is known as an advance decision to refuse treatment – or a living will – the hospital staff merely monitored her until she recovered sufficiently to be allowed home on January 2. She seemed very weak and only wanted to sleep, but she was a determined woman.
When David walked the dog that night, she took advantage of his absence to tape her head into a plastic bag. She ended her life in a terrible way, all alone. In my view – and that of 80 per cent of the population – Gillian should have been allowed the choice to quietly slip away in David’s arms. Under the current, barbaric law, this option was not available to her. As a result, while she still lay dead upstairs, a grieving David was subjected to police questioning from midnight until 6am the next morning.
He was not allowed to see or sit with his partner’s body, even though he had found her and called the emergency services. Despite Gillian’s best efforts, he was treated as a suspect in a potential murder.
Britain is blessed with good palliative care for patients nearing the end of life. It has been ranked number one in the world and most people can expect to ‘die well’. But, sadly, this is not guaranteed. Many of us have witnessed our loved ones suffer a lingering and painful death that is sometimes made worse by the very medical advances designed to help us.
This is fuelling an increasing public groundswell for change. Of course, a large part of the answer is to ensure that everyone has access to the excellent care that we know is possible. But that is not the whole answer. Even Baroness Illora Finlay, a palliative care expert who opposes a change in the law, agrees that better care is not a blanket panacea.
That’s because for some people, even the best care available can’t allow them to die with dignity and at peace.
A law that makes m people die alone like this is broken and savage
Gillian, who was passionate about animal rights and left bequests to Cats Protection and for the care of donkeys, was treated by well-intentioned and sympathetic doctors and wonderful Macmillan nurses. But no medication was able to make the final days of her life bearable.
I believe that choice at the end of life should include a change in the law to permit the option of assisted dying for people who are dying. Who is the current law protecting? Certainly not David or Gillian. Lord Falconer’s Assisted Dying Bill, to be debated next month, would prevent tragedies where people end their lives alone and without sharing their intentions with those closest to them. It would also protect people who don’t want to choose an assisted death by adding safeguards.
It is cruel and inhumane that we compel people such as Gillian to end her life alone, instead of in the arms of the man she loved, in order to protect him from prosecution. The current law is forcing people who may simply want to end the unhappiness and indignity of the end of their lives into an even worse situation. It is piling stress upon unimaginable distress.
I can’t imagine what it must be like to suffer so much you can’t go on any longer, but are unable to express that to your nearest and dearest. And that you forgo the comfort of their presence, because you love them. This is what our existing law is forcing people to do.
Some people, in other jurisdictions, do not have the shadow of a bad death hanging over them. The choice of assisted dying is a reality in some American states – Oregon, Washington, Montana and Vermont – as well as some European countries such as Switzerland, the Netherlands and Belgium.
In Oregon, assisted dying has been legal for more than a decade and a half, and to my knowledge their society has not collapsed, nor have their vulnerable citizens been dispatched by greedy relatives keen to inherit. People in Oregon are better protected by their law.
In Oregon, the terminally ill’s decisions about how they die are informed ones, made with health professionals, rather than in their absence. Allowing such choice importantly allows for alternatives to be suggested, for conversations about why the person wants to die and for loved ones to be able to come to terms with the decision in advance. Conversations David and Gillian were denied.
To argue, as some do, that to accept someone’s request for assisted dying is to devalue human life is absurd. It is a civilising act to allow people in extreme and terminal suffering the right to end their own life.
People in the UK have made it clear through opinion polls that they under- stand the difference between assistance to die for those who are dying, the right when dying to die well, and an unfettered right to die. Assisted dying is also about the patient making a decision based on an experience only they are privy to.
To argue that legalising assisted dying for dying competent adults will inevitably lead to a ‘slippery slope’ is equally absurd. When a law is passed, a framework for what is and is not permissible is set down. Any deviation from this is, by definition, illegal.
As an extra safeguard, Lord Falconer’s Assisted Dying Bill has a ten-year ‘sunset-clause’.
This means that the law must be reviewed ten years after having been passed, and if it is not considered to be working will be voted down and will cease to be law.
But I am confident that won’t be necessary. Experience in America has shown that the imagined slippery slope simply doesn’t happen. The Oregon Hospice Association initially opposed assisted dying when the Death With Dignity Act was debated.
Having seen it working well, they had no such opposition when the law was debated and subsequently passed in neighbouring Washington 14 years later. The law is working safely and well where permitted in the States.
What horrifies me most about this whole tragedy is that Gillian was made to die alone. There is something broken and savage about a law that says when you are so ill, so full of cancerous pain, you cannot have your family, your pets, the things that made your life valuable, to comfort you when you choose to die.
dignityindying.org.uk