When I Googled ‘assisted dying’, a link to the Samaritans was top of the list of websites presented to me by the computer algorithm. “Help is available, speak with someone today,” it said.
Don’t worry, I wasn’t looking for the Dignitas website; I just wanted to double-check the name of the MP sponsoring an assisted dying bill in the British parliament.
But in a world where the internet is often portrayed negatively, it was reassuring that someone with a bit of human decency had thought fit to programme in an alternative option for anyone thinking a Swiss euthanasia clinic offered a viable way out of their predicament.
I am not yet at the stage of needing Dignitas, but I am of an age when my grown-up children tease me about the type of care home they will ship me off to. Some Christmas I might find a one-way ticket to Switzerland under the tree.
On Thursday, I had intimations of mortality in the dentist’s chair when he told me an extraction was the only option for a tooth which had given up the ghost. As he wrestled with it – “it doesn’t want to come out,” he said – I thought: “This is how I go, one piece at a time.” (Sometimes I don’t have a sense of proportion.)
I am sensitised to the subject of death right now because I am reading Julian Barnes’s meditation on dying, Nothing to be Frightened Of.
It’s actually a very cheery book. Writers, journalists, medics and funeral directors often approach the subject with a degree of ‘black’ humour little understood by the rest of society. To quote Woody Allen, “I am not afraid of death, I just don’t want to be there when it happens.”
But even black humour does not disguise the fact that death is life’s constant companion and, in the end, it is something each of us has to come to terms with – stoically or not. “Birth was the death of him,” was Samuel Beckett’s pithy observation.
Like most readers – not just those for whom the death notices page is the first they turn to when they open their Irish News – I am acutely conscious of how precious life is, and how it is often taken away by those who have no right to interfere with a person’s history: domestic abusers preying on vulnerable women; executioners wilfully sending prisoners to meet their maker; politicians raining bombs down on schools and hospitals; presidents destroying anyone in their path to domination.
In the UK, death and dying is a devolved matter; so Kim Leadbeater’s Assisted Dying Bill, due to be introduced to MPs tomorrow, would not apply here (though in one of those odd quirks of the British version of democracy, the north’s MPs will have a vote).
The bill would allow terminally ill adults, with six months or less left to live, to access medical help to end their lives.
Keir Starmer supports a change in the law, but it will be a free vote and the last time there was a vote in Westminster the proposal failed.
Given the enormity of the issue, it is not surprising that there are strong feelings on both sides – not least because, for each of us, it is so personal. And it is not just a moral issue, it is a deeply emotional one too.
It is difficult not to feel for people like Esther Rantzen, who want to go at a time or their own choosing rather than have their lives taken over and prolonged unnaturally by medicines and machines; or to appreciate the opposite view of disability campaigners, including paralympian Tanni Grey-Thompson, who see assisted dying as the thin end of the wedge.
In broad terms I side with Rantzen. But, given the abuse of power we witness daily at a state, institutional and personal level, I worry about the protections for people we would consider vulnerable, and the risks too that some would feel impelled to choose death rather than be a burden.
It is right then that there should be a thorough debate of all the issues, that people on all sides should be listened to, and a considered decision made.
That debate needs to happen here too – and not just on the subject of assisted dying. There is unquestionably a gap between the thinking of the electorate and legislators about issues around sexual health, end of life care, and attitudes to individual freedom here.
We need grown-up debate, not mere subservience to a theocracy.
There is unquestionably a gap between the thinking of the electorate and legislators about issues around sexual health, end of life care, and attitudes to individual freedom here.