The subject of killing yourself by choice in old age is taboo. It doesn’t even have a name, so it’s almost impossible to talk about. We are scared of it, we are banned from doing it, we are discouraged from knowing about it. They criminalise even writing about it. Here is an unlawful sentence: I am going to help my mother finish her life in the way she wants. There aren’t many criminal sentences. It’s good to write a literal rather than metaphorical one for a change. Maybe I will be prosecuted for typing those words and if I am I will relish the opportunity to argue their legitimacy in front of a judge.
One of the reasons people misreport healthy Self-Deletion (I am clearly failing to find a good phrase) is because it affects insurance payouts. The life insurance companies, those bountiful fonts of humanity and benevolence, don’t pony up after a Closure. (Closure is also no good, with its echoes of bankruptcy and failure). They too are part of the conspiracy to make you limp every last agonising yard of your life no matter how crippled you are, how ugly the scenery.
The good news – it seems – is that many more people are taking control of their own destinies than the authorities realise. Naturally there are groups on the Internet raising awareness. Dignity in Dying ‘A heartbeat is not the only sign of life’ is the one I spent most time perusing, and was where I discovered the celebrities endorsing the cause: Ian McEwen, Sir Patrick Stewart and Jo Brand. Not bad ambassadors. McEwen wrote: The issue is not really of death but of how you live out the last chapter, those last sentences.
The difficulties faced by advocates of Conscious Dying are similar to those who support Abortion. I am pro-choice at both ends of life, and proud to say it. But it’s a hard sell when opponents make them both an issue of murder rather than human rights.
I spoke to a Tory ex-minister, now in the House of Lords, who had made a speech in the House when Rob Marris’ Private Member’s Bill on assisted suicide was overwhelmingly voted down in 2015. We met in Yorkshire, where he lived, after I had toured the ruins of Jervaulx Abbey, thinking I might make a comparison between them and Stanley’s mind. We talked over a glass of good wine in a rose-scented garden. He was, at 87, portly and a bit slow physically but smiling and as sharp as a rose thorn. He told me with pride that he had opposed Marris’ Bill.
‘Why?’ I asked.
‘For the simple reason that it was an invitation to unscrupulous people to kill wealthy relatives.’
‘But don’t the rights of those who want to choose how and when they die come into it?’
‘They cannot outweigh the rights of those who we endanger.’ He went on to say that reformers said they only wanted assisted suicide to be available for the terminally ill, but then by incremental extension more people would be included. He spoke as if people generally wanted to kill their relatives. But all evidence pointed in exactly the opposite direction. It would have meant more to me if he had taken the line that the taking of a life – or the abetting in the taking of a life – was in principle wrong. But his pragmatic line, though one I had heard many times, and which was taken by more than just this peer during the debate in Parliament, seemed bizarre. This was the narrative that the newspapers and newsfeeds loved to push. Here is a headline I recently read: Pharmacist murdered his father with lethal fruit smoothie then said it was assisted suicide, court heard. My first thought was You wouldn’t get a fruit smoothie down Stanley. But my second was, why should they want to discredit courageous and bold citizens who are helping people choose the place, time and manner of their own death? The headline we should be reading is Thousands of patients kept in captivity and tortured by the NHS.
People do not want to murder their relatives. It is incredibly rare. Murder, in the UK, is an extraordinary event, except on TV and in films, where for some silly reason it’s commonplace. The figures are clear: in Britain we don’t want to kill people. Out of a population of 56 million, 310 men and 180 women were killed in 2015. Half of the women were killed by their partners. Only 15 per cent were killed by other members of their family, i.e. not their partners. That is 46 males, and 27 females. And that included children. We don’t know how many of those were elderly, because, surprise surprise, the government is not collecting homicide figures for the over 80s. But even if they were all geriatrics, which they were not, it shows that there is no great desire to knock off an inconvenient granny or grandad. It doesn’t even happen on TV and in films. In a decidedly unscientific survey I kept count of the number of murders I saw on TV over about a month of viewing. It was well over 500, including zombies, out of an estimated general population in the dramas of about 2000. It’s dangerous being in movies or TV serials. But even in this land of carnage I didn’t see ONE family knocking off an inconvenient geriatric relative. It is a rubbish argument to say the law on assisted dying is to protect public safety.
I dropped the subject with the ex-minister. He wasn’t going to change his mind, he had said all there was for him to say on the matter and I was drinking his wine in his garden (or his son’s to be accurate). But I definitely felt as though I were being accused of accessory to murder by advancing the case for helping my mum kill herself when she wanted.
On all the many occasions I had discussed the subject of Signing Off with relatives of the person contemplating it I never had the slightest doubt that they were doing it entirely in the interests of the person who, exhausted and agonised by life, wished to end their life. It is that obdurate threesome the state, the Church and the medical profession that has fostered the notion that families want to kill their aged relatives only for malicious or pecuniary reasons. The design of the syringe driver used in hospitals on geriatrics for pain relief has been modified recently to prevent the midazolam being plunged too quickly. This new design is predicated on the idea that relatives, gathered around an elderly patient’s bedside are homicidal maniacs. They are not. We are not, I should say. There is a thick black line between murdering someone and helping them choose the time and manner of their departure. But no one is allowed openly to acknowledge this or talk about it without being accused – by politicians, doctors or clergymen – of being a killer.
The medical profession seems to delight in using the Hippocratic oath to torture the aged and their families, but a GP I spoke to did point out to me that it was unfair that the doctors were being picked on to do this onerous job, which they hadn’t signed up for, and it was a fair point. The doctors really should not have to shoulder the responsibilities of checking out their patients. Preventing all suicide is a stated target of the World Health Organization. The doctors, priests and politicians are like reverse bouncers at the door of the party which is life. Their job is stop guests leaving. To stop them going to meet the old man by the lake when they want. What does that say about the party? If you want to leave, it’s usually a sign you are not enjoying it. Keeping everyone trapped in life prevents the question of who actually wants to be there unasked and definitely unanswered. Those who kill themselves are clearly saying it’s not much cop any more. Doctors, politicians and clerics take this as a personal affront, a criticism of geriatric care, society and the efficacy of religious belief. But it is not a criticism of hospitals or doctors or priests. It’s a criticism of old age. It’s an acknowledgement of the rock-hard facts of getting to the end of life and the human body and mind falling apart. Can we not admit that? It’s like scrapping a car rather than having it break down every time we try to use it. Things die. This is nature. Accept it. And learn to do it with dignity and even beauty.
It is as mad to legislate against leaving life as it would be to make a law that requires a human to have permission to enter it. But it takes a lot of guts to kill yourself when the time is right, and not many of us are up to the challenge. (It shocked me that despite so many people talking about Dignitas, only 273 people from the UK had used its service in the 16 years up to 2014.) Ernest Hemingway was up to the job of Signing Off. He felt his considerable powers, both intellectual and physical, failing, and he knew what lay ahead. He had completed A Moveable Feast – an exquisite memoir of being a young man in Paris, both deeply romantic and rigorously unsentimental. And when has an American before or since written about Paris without trowelling on the cheese? A year later he was being described by his editor, Aaron Hotchner, as ‘unusually hesitant, disorganised and confused and suffering from failing eyesight … constantly worried about money and safety.’ Hemingway was sent to the Mayo Clinic and given electroconvulsive therapy only to be ‘released in ruins.’ A few days later, on the morning of 2 July 1961 he shot himself with his favourite gun.
His family released a statement saying it was an accident, which they later amended. To me, it was the great writer’s final triumph. He had a line below which he would not live. Life was for riding, not clinging onto in desperation. Hemingway had seen a life of action, of love, and of towering artistic achievement, and he had decided he wasn’t going to slide into dribbling infancy. And good luck to him. There was, it is true, a lot of suicide in his family: his brother and his father had also killed themselves. But at no point in his life before the end did Hemingway attempt or contemplate suicide, as far as we know. It was a brave and logical move, not an act of mental illness, as I believe most pre-geriatric suicides to be. Hemingway had a red line. I don’t know what it was. A writer once told me that Hemingway had been asked to write the funeral oration for John F. Kennedy by his widow Jackie, and had been unable to do it. I had pictured Hemingway staring at his portable typewriter, frozen with the realisation that he could no longer get the words onto the page without parodying himself. He had grimly accepted that he had lost it. Asked by the nation to eulogise the young slain president, the greatest living author found himself lost for words, unequal to the task, unable to make sense of the killing for millions of grieving countrymen. To some it would have been a moment of rueful reflection, and an announcement to any who cared that it was time for retirement. But not Hemingway. Not Papa. He didn’t possess a white flag, much less run one up the pole. He was a man of honour and he took the honourable course … When I checked this story I discovered it was nonsense, as John F. Kennedy was assassinated on 22 November 1963, two years and four months after Hemingway was buried under a simple and elegant headstone on his Idaho estate. The reason he didn’t write the funeral oration was because he had been stone dead for 28 months, which was as sound an excuse for not turning in copy as I have ever heard.
Whatever it was, the great American author had his red line. The thing about these lines, as far as I can see, is that if they are a long way ahead, they seem sharply defined. My mother’s was going to the lavatory unaided. What could be more simple? But when you got closer they blurred. You hurt your hand, which was expected to heal in a couple of days, but during that time you couldn’t wipe your bottom. Hold on. There’s the line. But it didn’t quite count. Indeed, in three days, the hand is well enough to go to the loo on your own, and you probably smile as you wipe your bottom saying I’m actually quite glad I didn’t top myself. And the next time you can’t do it, lying in bed on a drip, or with a broken pelvis from dissolving bones, you say to yourself ‘Well, I’ve had this done to me before and it’s really not that bad.’
What was my own red line? Because I definitely required one. I refuse to slide into infantilised catatonia. I know exactly where mine is: when an unrecognisable woman – or man – comes into my room and says Hello Dad. When I don’t know who my own children are … at that moment I will green light PROJECT TOP GUY. And I will be disciplined. When I start arguing to myself that it was just the light, or she’s got a new hairstyle, or he’s wearing a new shirt, or that I always have trouble with names, I will issue a stern reprimand to myself. Guy! I shall shout. If I can remember my name, that is. And therein lies the problem. If I can’t identify the two people I most love in the world, will I be able to have the wherewithal to knock myself off the perch? Planning will be required.
And that is what Susie was engaged in.