The Case for Assisted Dying

Image courtesy: Freepik

My grandmother was born as Norma Helen Wilkinson in a small town in the Pennines in 1938. Mother to two daughters, she also worked as a dinner lady, a barmaid and a care home worker. The title of animal lover did not come close to describing this woman’s dedication to all creatures great and small. Once, when my Mum was a teenager, she came home after a night out and told Grandma she’d seen a cat hit by a car. At 3am Norma drove them both back to the spot to sit in the pouring rain with the cat until it died. My childhood labrador Steve weighed about as much as a small hippo thanks to her belief that all pets should be allowed every indulgence, and then some. I specifically remember her always buying two ice cream cones, one big and one small, one for me and one for the dog. The big one was for the dog. 

Her other defining trait, one that I probably didn’t love as much, was her ability to talk to just about anyone, about anything, infinitely. When I’d visit her in the summer, it took what seemed like an eternity to walk across her tiny town because she’d stop and say hello to every passerby. She knew everybody’s life story, and always had time to chat their ear off about it. When staying at our house, she’d randomly break into song as she hoovered outside my Dad’s office. She loved to sing, and I still sometimes hum to myself the lyrics of Petula Clark’s song ‘Put your shoes on, Lucy’, (which she would sing to me every single time we left the house) whenever I tie my laces. 

She died when I was 16. I read the eulogy at her funeral. By then I’d grown to look just like her. I’d become a ferocious lover of animals. People remarked that I talked too much for my own good. But to tell you the truth, I didn’t feel as sad as I should have. She had already been taken from me 5 years before, and I had done my mourning.

When I was 11 years old, Norma was diagnosed with dementia. What happened to her in the following years is a fate I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy; to become a shell of your former self, your soul dead but your zombie-esque likeness doomed to shuffle on. It was her ability to speak that went first. How’s that for irony? Still a child at the time, I at first refused to believe that she was ill. But the day she trod on Steve’s paw, inciting a great yelp, and kept on walking, was the day I knew that she was gone. 

My grandmother went from being the most doting wife to a burden on my elderly grandfather, from being the center of her grandchildren’s world, to being an uncomfortable Christmas guest. She was moved to a nursing home about a year before she died, and filled her room with photographs of people she no longer recognised. On the weekends, teenage me was begrudgingly driven to the home to sit with her whilst my Mum tried to help my grandfather, struggling to watch his wife of over 60 years vanish before his eyes. 

When I was there, I would think about how Grandma was dying, and sometimes I would wonder what it would be like if she were dying from cancer. For the most part, cancer victims get to fight. They are brave, shining examples of the indomitable human spirit, even if they lose their fight. Often they retain their personality and cognisance right to the very end. And after they are gone, they are revered and mourned as loved ones taken from this world too soon. Dementia steals this legacy from you by making your final years so undignified and difficult that your loved ones might even be secretly relieved when you are gone. 

I don’t remember her very well now. I can mainly recall the above stories we’d tell after she’d died (too painful to discuss when she was still living, if you can call it that). Most of the memories I do have are of my Mum and Grandad struggling to look after her, the realities of which are too depressing to share. I wish I didn’t have these memories. I wish, when I was 11, that she had gone peacefully and gracefully, surrounded by loved ones, and had been celebrated at her funeral like the staple of the community she was. I wish she’d died as herself, she’d have so hated being pitied. I wish that I could have said goodbye to her whilst she still knew who I was, and that I mourned a memory of her untouched by sadness. 

It is for this reason that I hope MP’s agree with myself and also 66% of the public, and vote to make assisted dying legal in the UK. In truth, I do not know if Norma would have chosen to end her life knowing she had dementia. Maybe it is a wish I have prescribed her to remedy the uniquely strange grief that I hold. But I do know this: I want to live a rich life, like she did, and when I die, I want it to be on my terms. I sincerely hope that I or anyone else I love never gets Dementia, or that AI can do something useful and find a bloody cure. But if I did, I hope that assisted dying will be legal, so that one day, my granddaughter will never have to write an article like this about me.