Letters – 18 September 2015
From life and death to credit unions
Life and Death
I read Anne Wade’s article (4 September) with anguish. My arguments are also experiential. I, too, was privileged to be with my mother as she slipped quietly from this life to the Hereafter. Yes: it was ‘a good death’. But anyone who truly loved my mother would have fervently wished her spared the last five years of her life. Effectively deaf and blind, and in constant, excruciating pain from all-over arthritis, her life was a living hell. She was determined, and kept going; but it was a torture for her and for us. The proposed Assisted Dying Bill would have given her options.
More recently – actually just last month – I was present at a wonderful but tragic memorial service for a much loved friend and member of the farming community. Widowed by cancer over twenty years ago he had continued to live in his farm house and actively run the farm until very recently. Loving family members lived nearby; but he had no need for ‘care’. Then, suddenly, his health deteriorated dramatically. His daughter took him to the A&E department of the nearest hospital – and mercifully he was allowed home. The next day his son visited. Our friend, who always wanted to die at home, and independent, had made his own decision. In the farming context, his obvious choice was a shotgun. Shocking. However, if an assisted dying law were in place he could have made his choice in a way which would have been comfortable and loving for everyone.
Jane Taylor
Like Anne Wade’s dog, I suffer from severe heart failure but my experience has been very different to his, which shows the danger of trying to universalise our own experience. We are all different.
Early last year I went into decompensated heart failure. I put on thirteen kilograms of fluid, twenty per cent of my weight. I was in considerable pain. Diuretics were ineffective. I was housebound for over three months and in a morphine haze for over three weeks. I had to be given the drug spirolnolactone in spite of an old and failing kidney transplant. My potassium level rose. I was placed on the terminally ill list. Finally, a reduction to half the normal minimum dose of spirolnolactone reduced my potassium level and I recovered, albeit to a poor state of health.
Having been chronically ill for many years, to me the tenor of Anne Wade’s article is the stuff of nightmares – the doctor or nurse you cannot get through to.
Fortunately, I usually can. Few of us reach old age without seeing some of our friends, relatives or acquaintances die agonizing deaths. At the dialogue at Friends House in 2010, presented by the Quaker Concern Around Dying and Death, there were at least a couple of harrowing accounts of the deaths of people’s relatives.
The proposed legislation was modelled on the Oregon experience, where a very small number, 0.3 per cent of deaths, are a result of assisted dying.
Michael Woolliscroft
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