My dad, at ninety-seven, fervently wanted to get to a hundred. Despite a body which was failing him in every way, and a mind that was increasingly hijacked by other realities, he would have been appalled had anyone suggested to him that he should 'go gently into that good night', deliberately assisted by medication. Eventually he descended into a twilight of bizarre apparitions and increasingly frequent lung infections, and finally a few months before his ninety-eighth birthday, died of pneumonia.
That's one way of doing it. Despite the infirmities and indignities of his last year, my dad was lucky: he didn't die in pain. He didn't need, and would never have asked for, my help in leaving this world. Had he done so, I would have done all I could, but I doubt I'd have been able to get him to Switzerland: no plane company would have flown him at his age, in his state of health.
Our laws are meant to be one-size-fits-all. Of course, they don't: they fit nobody very well, and many people very badly. But despite the fact that I support assisted dying, I don't see it as a solution which can be tailored to fit the majority: there are just too many variables. The best we can hope for is to find a way of responding to those in the greatest need, and helping them in an ethical, transparent and principled way. I think we are coming to the time when enough people (though not of course the most vociferous: the religiously indoctrinated) are beginning to realise that we must address this question, because otherwise, as the population ages (and becomes more infirm) there will increasingly be suffering on a scale which is unacceptable. We need to learn from Switzerland, Belgium, the Netherlands, and the two states in the USA which have legalised assisted dying: learn from them, incorporate what they have worked out into our own legislation, and give ourselves a proper choice.
The choice is not between life and death, but between a good death or a bad death - this point is clearly made in Sir Terry Pratchett's excellent documentary, 'Choosing to Die'. Furthermore, it should not be a choice forced upon anyone by anyone else, and it must be made only by someone of sound mind and sound intention. Yet this very stipulation presents those with dementia with an impossible conundrum. If they wish to end their lives before they become unrecognisable to themselves and to those who care for them, they have to do it before their condition has progressed beyond the point where they can no longer speak for themselves. That is - they have to kill themselves prematurely, whilst their minds are still fully active. This is appalling. Somehow, if assisted dying is also to be made available to those with incurable, progressively debilitating dementia, this terrible Catch 22 must be addressed.
But in the present climate of religious intransigence and 'Doctor Death' scare-mongering (a tabloid spectre entirely suited to the comic book mentality of the hysterical masses) it is unlikely that we shall even get as far as framing legislation for those who need an alternative to dying in physical pain; we are more likely to get a law which will define flight paths for pigs over built up areas.
Legislating for legal euthanasia is probably the most fraught kind of legislation there is - more emotive than birth control, gay rights; just as burdened with a malignant history as genetic manipulation. No thinking adult can really be emotionally indifferent to this subject - after all, we're all going to die. At the moment, in the UK and almost everywhere else, we have few alternatives: we can let nature take its course, though sometimes horribly; we can commit suicide, but rarely in a way which constitutes a 'good death'; or we can rely on the health services to ease our way - but the reality is that these very services are going to be so overloaded that even present standards of palliative care are likely to be compromised. If we have money (a spare ten thousand pounds or so) we can go to Dignitas, but for how much longer can this compassionate institution take on responsibilities which we ought to be shouldering, ourselves?
Yet although there's no easy answer to this problem, it doesn't mean there's no answer at all. We need to open up the debate, address the issues in a very clear-minded way, force our irresponsible and cowardly politicians to realise that assisted dying is an issue they can no longer duck. Of course it's a minefield of dangers. Of course laws must be made in such a way that they cannot be used to callously bump off the vulnerable. Nevertheless - we cannot pretend that our present way of doing things, with its muddled fudging of legalities, is acceptable. It may mean that old and ill people like my father can be reasonably sure that they won't be hurried to a premature death - but at the same time there are far too many people dying in pain, in chronic despair: pleading for help that cannot be given without covert or overt transgression of the law.
If I become terminally ill, and see nothing ahead but suffering and a bad death - I would like to think I'd have an alternative. Not an obligation to depart, not pressure to revalue my life in terms of the burden I might become - but a free and open choice: made in the reassuring knowledge that there were compassionate people who would help me depart at a time of my own choosing. A truly civilised society must attend both to its beginnings and its endings. What we have at the moment is a society bewitched by the fantasy of being eternally young - dying unpleasantly must not be allowed to spoil the dream. This attitude is more than pitiful: it is criminally negligent of our human rights. Yet it is a travesty we have lived with for so long that we no longer notice how ingrained it has become.
It is time to grow up.
