But would I still think this was such a good idea if I went to witness it firsthand?
In the U.K. assisted dying is illegal and anyone who dares assist a stricken friend or relative at their request is liable to end up in court, possibly on a charge of murder. There is some fine detail around this and it appears that some leniency could be afforded in the case of those who help out of compassion or love, which is why, so far, the judges have been extremely understanding; in short, here in Britain, amateurs are allowed to help other amateurs to die. It is a nonsense but it is the only nonsense we have got.
In Belgium, Holland, and Switzerland citizens stricken with a debilitating and incurable disease can choose to die at the kindly hands of a physician who would have the skills and the legal framework on which to depend. These countries are amiable, decent democracies, not known for excitability or stupidity. Usually their churches treat this with some dismay, but generally the position seems to be that it is entirely up to the conscience of the individual concerned.
I followed two men to Dignitas, Peter Smedley and Andrew Colgan, two entirely different men from entirely different backgrounds with entirely different diseases and one steadfast intent which was not to spend any more time in the jaws of the beast and go straight to the last act.
I first met Peter Smedley and his wife, Christine, at their large and beautiful home. The Smedleys have a wonderful talent of getting on with everybody they meet in a very English way. Christine would have rather Peter stayed at home to be cared for and, indeed, could have afforded the very best of care, but in the little world of this marriage an accord had been reached and Christine was on her husband’s side and to hell with what the law might say.
I must admit that I entertained a brief vision of what might happen if Christine Smedley was sent to prison for the dreadful crime of helping her husband to travel to another country, and concluded she would certainly shake the place up to its general improvement and probably end up taking tea with the warden. As it was, she and Peter went off on a holiday before Christmas to see friends in Switzerland.
Later, in the vicious early winter weather, I met Andrew Colgan, forty-two with multiple sclerosis. Like Peter, he had no further interest in receiving care. I must report that both men had nothing bad at all to say about the care of the seriously ill in this country. In fact, they had very little to say about care at all except that they were resolute in not wanting to be cared for.
Andrew looked younger than his age, wiry, all sinews, and at first you would think, “Well, nothing much wrong with him,” until you see the strain in his face. He was a science fiction fan, and the director had several times to scold us for neglecting the purpose of the interview to indulge in such weighty debates as “Was Blake’s 7 really as pants as it seems in memory, or what?” But it was when we were back on track that I found the anger welling up. Andrew was going to die in Switzerland earlier than he might have needed to because, like Peter, he did not want to put any member of his family in jeopardy of the law for assisting him to travel. In truth, I wondered if his fears were essentially groundless, and given that the director of Public Prosecutions is surely not a vindictive or cruel man and also that the judiciary is noticeably sensible in cases like this I may well be right.
However, sometimes authority gets a rush of blood to its head and prefers to punish the lamb that strays more harshly than the wolf that ravages. Besides, who would choose to see their mother in a court of law, however benign? So he was going alone, and I was thinking, “Why couldn’t he have a physician-assisted death here in England?” And, who knows, if he’d known that he could die when he chose to, then perhaps he would have hung on for longer; there is some evidence that this might have been the case, to judge by experience elsewhere.
But, when I talked to him, he was adamant, picking up my hesitant countersuggestions and detecting them for what they were with the speed of Russian over-the-horizon radar. He had been through all that, did not want to be cared for and, like Sherlock Holmes, wanted to take his enemy with him.
We met Andrew in Switzerland for a drink. And I think it was at that point that my head gently started to spin. I have been to wakes, but never one where the principal performer was going to be raising a glass. The way you deal with a situation like this is with humour and so we laughed and joked and, for a blessed while, found ourselves in a happy place. I know this because I was fortunate enough to have with my father, in the months before his death, those conversations that you would wish to have with a parent in those circumstances and we found that somehow humour always got through.
I once heard an opponent of assisted dying in general and Dignitas in particular say, “People get killed in an industrial estate!” clearly hoping to conjure up images of Cybermen on the march. In fact it is an industrial estate where you will find the small blue house with a little garden about which one can best say that someone has tried very hard. It has to be in an industrial area, because it would not be acceptable in a residential area. There was a field of pumpkins on the other side of the narrow road, no traffic to speak of, and no sounds at all emanating from the other buildings, which seemed quite benign; perhaps the Cybermen were off on their holidays.
I knew that Christine Smedley was going to sit with her husband and, thinking that a knighthood must have some purpose, I had earlier asked her if she would like a fellow Brit there as well, and she was grateful for the offer. Peter wanted our director to film his death, and to include it in the documentary, because he wanted his death to count for something. I have seen dead bodies before, one of them exceedingly, horribly dead, and I reckoned that the death of a stricken man who sincerely wished to die would not be too stressful. As it happened I was wrong, but for all the wrong reasons.
According to my watch his death took about twenty-five minutes. As the organs and chambers of his body yielded, I heard occasional sounds not too dissimilar to those made by my father as he gradually succumbed to pancreatic cancer and morphine. My mother believed he was trying to say something. I didn’t. Outside of actual trauma it takes quite some time for a body to die, treacherously hanging on despite the wishes of the brain.