The people who run Dignity in Dying (formerly the Voluntary Euthanasia Society) fear being kept alive unwillingly more than they fear death, which is understandable. However, to me at any rate, their mantra of dying with dignity is less easy to understand. Dying is a biological process, and there is no dignity to it, as anyone who is familiar with death will tell you. But the departure of the soul from the body is spiritual, which is altogether different. Even people who do not believe in God, or the human soul, will tell you that at the moment of death something mysterious, even awe-inspiring, occurs which they cannot explain or understand.
‘To die in peace’ is the biblical expression, which I prefer. To be allowed the space, the time, and the silence in which to know that I am going to die, to contemplate death and to come to terms with the inevitable, and above all to become friends with and welcome the Angel of Death, is what I pray for. All dignity will go as control of bodily functions goes, and I will become totally dependent on others, but if peace remains, that, for me, would be the perfect end.
Yet I am realist enough to know that such an idyll is unlikely. A hospitalised death amongst a crowd of other old ladies is what I can expect, and must accept. There will be no peace, and this, too, must be accepted. I anticipate rejection, because the old and ill are not a pretty sight, and few people want to enter these places. Few people want to draw close to death, so I must accept that I will probably die alone. It is widely assumed that the dying will be in pain, and the kindest thing is to drug them, so I accept that I may be drugged stupid, and my role will be simply to submit.
This is not an inspiring end, but it is already the norm, and few of us will escape it. We can cry aloud: ‘Do not go gentle into that good night … Rage, rage against the dying of the light.’[7] We can huff and puff about our dignity and our rights, but it will avail nothing. Death, the great leveller, makes fools of us all. The Grace of Humility, and her sister Acceptance, will be a better and surer guide on the hard and stony path that lies ahead.
But what have we to complain about? Practically everyone of my generation leads a life enhanced by, or even dependent upon, medicine. We have grabbed greedily the extra years and called them our ‘right’. So perhaps we should simply accept that a hospitalised death is the price that must be paid.
Euthanasia is not the same as suicide, which is no longer a criminal offence. On 9 July, 2009, Sir Edward and Lady Downes died in the Swiss clinic, Dignitas. Lady Downes was seventy-four, riddled with cancer, and had been told she had only a few weeks to live. Sir Edward was eighty-five. He was comparatively healthy, but his hearing and eyesight were going, and he was finding it increasingly difficult to cope with the infirmities of old age.
Sir Edward had been a very distinguished opera conductor. I knew his name fifty years ago when I was a young girl haunting Covent Garden Opera House, queuing for hours for a cheap ticket. Edward Downes was a repetiteur in those days, occasionally taking the baton when someone fell sick. Later, he earned international acclaim. I was stunned to read of his death, and of the way it had occurred.
This clinic, Dignitas, gives me the creeps. What sorts of people administer it? I shut my mind to such thoughts. But when it came to contemplating the death of Sir Edward, it seemed to me entirely logical. He had married the ballerina Joan Weston in 1955 and theirs was a true love match, lasting for fifty-four years. The thought of life without her must have been intolerable to him. Had her illness come ten years earlier, when he was still conducting, he might have seen things differently. But at eighty-five, with his life’s work over, due to failing sight and hearing, and beset with the usual problems of old age, and above all, the loss of his wife, he wanted to go with her.
In the olden days – as my grandchildren would say – a man like Sir Edward would probably not have survived for long after the death of his wife. Grief-laden, lost and disorientated, unable to cope, perhaps not eating, not taking care of himself, he would have wandered aimlessly around and ultimately ‘taken to his bed’, from which he would neither have had the strength nor the will to rise. No one would have been surprised. It would have been a welcome and merciful end to a long, happy, and fulfilled life.
But we are not living in the olden days. We are living in the twenty-first century, when it is not lawful for an old man to die of old age. A team of doctors and nurses and social workers would have been on to him, assessing and monitoring every function of his mind and body. Dozens of things would have been found to be ‘wrong’ with him, for which drugs could be prescribed. Had he attempted to refuse treatment, psychiatrists would have been called in to assess his mental capacity. It could have gone on for years. Sir Edward was having none of it. He wanted to go with his wife, and he chose to do so in the only way that he felt he could.
Less than a month after the deaths of Sir Edward and Lady Downes the Law Lords required the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) to clarify the law on assisted dying. Hitherto, to aid, abet or assist anyone to commit suicide had been a criminal offence with a maximum penalty of fourteen years in prison. However, no one in the UK has ever been prosecuted for doing so.
In February 2010 the DPP confirmed that someone who was ‘wholly motivated by compassion’ should not be charged with a crime. This is one of six factors for prosecutors to consider as they decide on the merits of each case. Assisting suicide is still a criminal offence, but the new guidance means that it may not be regarded as being in the public interest to prosecute.
We are on the cusp of a seismic legal change concerning the condition of human life at its close. Events are moving so fast that, at the time of publication, this section of my writing may already be out of date.
A Commission on Assisted Dying was set up in 2010 and is expected to continue until the end of 2011. After that it may well be that new legislation comes into place.
2010
HELGA
Is there anything more enduring than an old friendship? Beautiful, elegant … Helga will always be associated in my mind with Paris in the mid-1950s, where we both worked as au pairs. She was about twenty-eight, and I seven years younger. She was German, from Munich, where her father was an opera singer at the State Opera. The Nazi Party, the war, and the virtual destruction of Germany had overshadowed all her early life; she had known nothing else. Her mother had died, and, after the war, Helga and her sister were homeless - I never knew exactly why, because her father was still alive. She hinted that her father was a very difficult man, a musician and singer, wrapped up in his art, expecting and revelling in the adulation of his fans (mostly women), and quite incapable of looking after two teenage girls. The two sisters walked hundreds of miles to an aunt who lived in or near Hamburg. They ate whatever they could find, and slept where they could. She told me that the American soldiers stationed in Germany were always very good to them, and it was through contact with them that she learned to speak English, which she spoke all her life with a delightful touch of an American accent.
When the girls got to Hamburg, they found it to be in complete ruin. They had heard that the city had been badly damaged, but their imagination had not prepared them for the reality. Chaos reigned, and of the suburb in which their aunt’s home had been, nothing was left. Their aunt was presumed dead. How the sisters lived, I just do not know, because she said nothing of the years between 1946 and ’56. At some stage she must have learned shorthand and typing, and worked as an English/German secretary, and then decided to come to Paris to learn French and become a trilingual secretary, which was better paid. This was where we met.