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This website has now become a |
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Secular Humanism |
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(ie. grounded in reality and not fantasy) |
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| Quotes about activism | ||
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I watched as my parents faced their dignified, peaceful
death - together When the conductor Sir Edward Downes and his terminally ill wife Joan decided to end their lives, their daughter Boudicca was one of the first to be told. She tells why she supported them and describes their last moments at the Dignitas clinic in Zurich. The Observer, Sunday 19 July 2009 It was Good Friday and Boudicca Downes had just put her three-year-old son to bed. Her husband was preparing dinner in the kitchen of their flat when the phone rang and she answered to hear the voice of her father. "He told me that my mum had cancer," said Boudicca, her voice wavering as she recalled the conversation with Sir Edward Downes, the world-famous conductor. "He told me of the last two weeks, of the checks mum had been having, and the various doctor appointments. And he told me the prognosis: a matter of months, possibly weeks. Then he just said, 'so we've decided, we're both going to Switzerland'." |
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Her 85-year-old father and his terminally ill wife, Joan, 74, would travel
together from their London home to the Dignitas clinic in Zurich where they
would be helped to fulfil their final desire - to commit suicide together.
It was there that Boudicca, 39, and her brother Caractacus, 41, gripped
their parents' hands as each swallowed a single dose of a lethal
barbiturate. Within minutes Edward and his wife were dead. It was three
months, to the day, since he had made that phone call to his daughter. Sitting last week in the London house in which she grew up surrounded by shelves lined with thousands of her father's books, Boudicca took a deep breath and began to explain why she had supported her parents; why she had backed not just her mother, who had only a few, painful months left, but also her father, who may have lived for a decade or more. "Mum was not frightened of dying, but she was frightened of a living death," she said. "She loved her life and she was infuriated by any type of illness, even a cold, by anything that sapped her energy levels because she had stuff to do," said Boudicca. "The idea of being increasingly weak, fragile and tired in the last weeks of her life were unbearable." Even at 74, Joan was the only person with more energy than her 3-year-old grandson, Zeki. It is perhaps not difficult for people to understand why Boudicca supported her mother's decision to cut short a few painful, exhausting and soul-destroying months: days when she would no longer be able to smile at her daughter, play with her grandson or engage in intellectual conversation with her husband. All Boudicca wanted for the woman who had loved her throughout her life was "a dignified death involving the least suffering possible". But what about their father? "I understand why there have to be very careful regulations to protect the vulnerable," she said. "In my father's case, and I think in the case of many others, the issue is not the fact that you are about to die of a terminal illness in a certain number of weeks or months. It is that your life becomes unbearable because of physical or mental suffering. My father wasn't terminally ill, but he was 85, he had many health problems. He was in terrible, terrible pain and had been for a long time." Boudicca described how hard it had been for her father to lose his sight and with it one of his greatest loves - reading. She looked around the room she was sitting in: "I am surrounded by thousands of books on every possible subject from history to art to languages to westerns. He was completely obsessed with books." But it was not just his eyesight. Upstairs, in another room lined with orchestral scores and tapes, stood Edward's piano - a painful reminder to Boudicca of watching as her father's hearing began to slip away. Though he wore a hearing aid, it distorted the sounds around him. "For someone with my father's ear, that was hard to bear," said Boudicca of the man who conducted the first night at the Sydney Opera House, led the BBC Philharmonic, and worked with the Royal Opera House Chorus and Orchestra for more than five decades. "Having lived such an incredible life, he couldn't read and he couldn't listen," said Boudicca. "He didn't have a terminal illness, but without my mother his life would have been unbearable - he would have been utterly miserable. "Ten years of misery - was that really worth fighting for after such a full life?" Unquestionably, the news that Joan was soon to die played a huge part in Edward's decision to cut short his own life. Nevertheless, he had to make his own case to Dignitas as to why the group should help him to take his life. "The fact that his wife was dying was not a factor in their evaluation of his suitability," said Boudicca, who dismissed claims that the organisation was not thorough enough in its checks. "The Swiss government regulates it closely. Dignitas needed to ensure my parents were absolutely convinced of what they wanted to do and they had many occasions throughout the whole process, right up to the minute before, to change their minds," said Boudicca. "It was so thorough I was worried mum would not be well enough to travel or that she would collapse before they were given a date." That did not happen. After 54 years of marriage - 37 in the same family home in Blackheath, south London; after bringing up two children and watching a grandson come into the world; after a lifetime filled with professional triumphs and moments of joy - Edward and Joan boarded a flight to Zurich, Switzerland, for their final trip together. Caractacus travelled with them, while Boudicca flew in from her home in Rome. "The idea of travelling to Zurich and being there in a hotel for four days was very difficult because you want to be at home, but in reality we spent a wonderful last few days together. My parents were always good fun and they had no regrets. There were no last-minute confessions or requests for forgiveness. We didn't need that." Joan had been reluctant for her children to be there, but Dignitas asked them to come as witnesses and promised it was something they would not regret. "It would be very strange to be anywhere else knowing that my parents were dying that Friday morning," said Boudicca. They were given anti-nausea liquid, and after half an hour they swallowed the lethal shot that would bring their "wonderful lives" to an end. "It was calm and dignified - as they wanted," said Boudicca. "I will always know that they had a peaceful death - together." The bodies were cremated and the ashes scattered in a Swiss forest. There was no funeral. From there Boudicca and her brother flew to Rome, where Boudicca works as a producer for a UN organisation, so she could be with her son and husband. She told Zeki that he would not see his London grandparents again and tried to explain why she was so sad. Then Boudicca and Caractacus flew to London to start sorting through their childhood home. "Everything is imbued with them, everything," said Boudicca walking through the family house where she spent so many happy years. She stared at the garden - lovingly tended by her mother, who would wake early in the morning in her final weeks to water the plants and flowers. She sat in the kitchen where Joan would spend hours offering a friendly ear to her friends. "My father would make the tea and then he would disappear to his study. His hunger for knowledge was relentless - he was going over Russian verbs three weeks ago," said Boudicca. And they contacted the police. "We were well aware of the legal implications," she said. "But we had nothing to hide. The priority was making sure mum and dad died how they wanted - and together." All their friends understood the decision, she said. "My parents were fiercely independent and determined people. They did everything in a rational, slightly controversial and imaginative way - that is how they lived their lives. They weren't mainstream," she added, explaining that her father had chosen their names because of a love of ancient history. Edward and Joan, she said, were not the type of people who had to pack their final months with the things they had dreamed of doing in their lives - they had already done it all in their decades together. "They always lived everything so intensely. It wasn't a case of making up for lost time," she said. ----------------------------------------------- The final human right • Dignitas was founded in Zurich in 1998 by Ludwig Minelli, a lawyer, who says that his group allows people to exercise "the last human right". • Last Friday Sir Edward Downes, 85, and his 74-year-old wife, Joan, became the 116th and 117th Britons to take their lives at the clinic. • At least five of the British people to die at the Swiss clinic did not have illnesses that doctors would describe as terminal. • Conditions of those who have gone to the clinic to commit suicide include cancer, motor neurone disease, multiple sclerosis and rheumatoid arthritis. • Last year, Daniel James, 23, became the youngest Briton to be assisted in his suicide at Dignitas. He had been left paralysed from the chest down after a rugby accident and was in constant pain. • In 2003, Reg Crew, a former docker with motor neurone disease, became the first named Briton to take his life at Dignitas. He was accompanied by a television crew. • Debbie Purdy, who has multiple sclerosis, lost a landmark battle in which she tried to clarify the law on assisted suicide. Although in theory punishable by up to 14 years in prison, none of the family members who have accompanied Britons to Dignitas has been prosecuted. |
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Me and the secular police |
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