A recent health scare has made me angrier than ever at the way you are not allowed to die when you want to. Of course, you can commit suicide, but what a sad and messy — dangerous hardly seems the right word — route that is likely to be.
Why does anyone, unless they have a strongly-held religious belief, refuse others the right to die? Are our current MPs really such a deeply religious bunch?
Whatever their reasons, I have to remember the arguments I had with the matron of a wonderful (and wonderful entirely thanks to her) old people’s home. She was fiercely opposed to sleeping pills which K, a friend of mine then in her eighties, craved. Some two years later — with us having won the argument — K marshalled a stash of pills and a plastic bag (which proved unnecessary) and, after locking the door to her room, lay back on her bed and ended what had become for her a life no longer worth living.
When the police were called in to deal with this crime scene, it was not long before they found K’s cuttings about the right to die. A rebel all her life, and a rebel to the end.
Now, all these years later, I found myself in danger of being in a situation I did not want to be in. It was only after a few days of mounting horror at the thought of becoming a permanent invalid that I remembered there was a way out. It did not have to be a home-made hit and miss affair: given the funds, and if I could keep my nerve, I could turn to Dignitas. It is no exaggeration, to say that the sudden and strangely belated realisation that I could take charge of my own death rendered me, momentarily, euphoric.
This is not the place to go into the complications of using this service. A Guardian article A Trip to Switzerland in Search of a Good Death tells you what you need to know, which is that while still in your right mind, sufficiently determined and sufficiently mobile, this can be achieved. But, beware of involving anyone else in helping to navigate this maze: assisting someone to kill themselves remains a criminal offence in the UK, punishable by up to fourteen years imprisonment.
But why on earth should it be considered less acceptable to help dying people to an easy death than to assist them (as, thankfully, we still do) not to give birth to babies they are not ready or able to look after?
When someone learns they have an incurable disease and knows the dying is likely to be long-drawn-out, painful and expensive, it is understandable that they might prefer to set their affairs in order, finish whatever book they are reading, say their goodbyes, and then let go.
We don’t all have the courage and genius of Tony Judt, whose rapturous essay The Memory Chalet was written when, in his own words, he lay ‘. . .trussed, myopic, and motionless like a modern-day mummy . . . ‘
As for me, I was given a reprieve. The whole episode proved to be no more than a dress rehearsal.