LEAD STORY

Dying well

The Right Revd David James, Bishop of Bradford,

responds to the current campaigns to change the present law and argues passionately against so-called assisted suicide

D

the hospice movement has been

the greatest gift from the Church to this country in the past fifty years; this is where to come if you really want to die with dignity

i died a few days ago. She had suffered from multiple sclerosis for the best part of thirty years, sending the last eight of

them in a Leonard Cheshire Home, where my wife and I occasionally visited her. Her husband and her children were frequent visitors and when they could they would take her out in a wheelchair; and there was a secial place in church for her to sit in her wheelchair, neither at the back where she would feel an outsider, nor at the front where she would be exposed, but in the middle of everyone. Di had the chance to end her life a year ago

when she could no longer swallow, but she decided she wanted to go on living and loving and being loved not just by her family but by the staff in the care home as well. As so oſten happens, her helplessness and her vulnerability brought out all that is good in those she met. Te way she and her husband lived out the ‘in sickness’ part of the marriage vows was quite awesome, and enormously inspiring to everyone who saw them together – ‘Where there is love there is God’. People like Debbie Purdy from Bradford and

Sir Terry Pratchet make the news as they seek clarification as to whether assisted suicide can be a legal option or campaign for a change in the law, but the Di’s of this world who, as they go through the valley of weeping use it for a well, are unheard and unseen. I didn’t know Di well enough to have

any intimation as to whether she ever contemplated ending her life prematurely to

‘spare’ either herself or her family, but I know my own mother who lived to be 88 would have ‘done the decent thing’ had she the chance, not because of any illness but simply because she lived for her family, wouldn’t have wanted to be any trouble to anyone, and would have wanted my brother and me to enjoy her worldly wealth sooner rather than later, and not have it ‘wasted’ on paying for people to look aſter her. Had she done so, we would have been uterly horrified.

B

aroness Ilora Finlay is a consultant in palliative care. She wrote recently about her

own mother suffering from advanced breast cancer and who decided that the end could

4 ■ newdirections ■ April 2010

not come soon enough and who made it clear that, had assisted suicide been legal, this would have been what she chose. She described how a conversation between her mother and the hospice chaplain transformed the situation: ‘Wise enough to realize there was no point

talking about God to this agnostic lady and experienced enough to know we all have a story, he quietly and patiently asked Mum to tell him hers. And so he sat, this quiet, unassuming man, and listened, soaking up the years, as she told him her views and philosophy on life. And it was in this telling that it dawned on Mum that her decrepit body still held an acive mind. Suddenly she realized that, if she wasn’t going to be allowed to kill herself, she had beter make the most of what time remained.’ Her mother responded to palliative treatment and lived for a further four years that were

‘almost more precious than the eighty-four that had preceded them. Tose four years we shared were the most precious giſt. Without them, Mum would have missed what she described as some of the richest times in her life and we would have missed understanding just what an amazing person she was.’ Among the many medical conditions which

can afflict us as we age is depression, but it creeps upon us without our realizing and is aggravated by other illnesses; and oſten, when people contemplate ending their lives, or express a desire that someone else should do so, it is the depression talking. Many people, who have wished for death as the only way out, have come through this to a late flowering in their lives which would not have happened had there been easy access to euthanasia. I have an elderly relative for whom I am

executor. She suffers from dementia and lives in a nursing home. For quite a time she would tell me that someone ought to shoot her; she would be beter dead. My faith tells me that I would be also…to

be with Christ which is far beter! She has now come through that depressed state and is happy and comfortable and looks set to reach a hundred. P.D. James wrote a one-off novel

Te Children of Men in which people drowned themselves in a state-sponsored ritual when they reached a certain age – an age which she Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40