Last updated at 12:21, Thursday, 04 February 2010

Should we choose when we want to die? If we’re suffering a painful, lingering death, should we be able to tell medics when enough is enough?

It has been dismissed by some as ‘death on demand’. This demeans the debate.

We all have our own best hopes for a peaceful, quick and clean death, maybe on a moonlit beach, a sun-kissed meadow, or a stunning mountain-top.

Or just at home, surrounded by family and friends.

Sir Terry Pratchett this week made a remarkable, heartfelt, moving and eloquent speech on behalf of assisted suicide (he prefers the phrase ‘assisted death’).

The multi-million selling author who suffers from the incurable and increasingly prevalent Alzheimer’s wants a tribunal set up to help those with incurable diseases end their lives with help from doctors.

Sir Terry said the “time is really coming” for assisted death to be legalised to provide terminally-ill people with a “death worth dying for”.

He wants to see measures put in place to ensure that anyone seeking to commit suicide was of sound mind and not being influenced by others.

A ‘tribunal’ would listen to the patient’s appeal and weigh that against comments by medics and family.

His comments follow the acquittal of Kay Gilderdale, who was cleared of attempted murder after helping her daughter, Lynn, to kill herself.

She admitted aiding and abetting her 31-year-old daughter, who had been battling chronic fatigue syndrome ME for years, to take her own life.

Lynn, who had been left paralysed and unable to swallow, was found dead at their home on December 4, 2008.

Her mum was given a 12-month conditional discharge.

I can’t imagine what it must be like to see your child suffer this way.

Happily, most of us won’t have to endure the agonies of watching our loved ones die a slow and grimly lingering death.

But medical advances mean more and more of us are living longer, despite in some cases, appalling, terminal illness.

And this can come at a terrible cost to the quality of that life.

Sir Terry’s address made me remember an astonishing interview with the ailing playwright Dennis Potter by Melvyn Bragg.

Potter was wracked with cancer and could only conduct the hour and a bit interview on with regular swigs of morphine, sips of champagne and cigarettes.

Potter was poetic, poignant, pithy and impudent he was not sentimental, soft, soppy or with a hint of self-pity.

He came out with a heart-wrenching explanation of how his final days seemed to him as he faced death and how the pear trees in his garden had the “blossomest blossom”.

Death, or a near-death experience heightens our awareness and apprec-iation of life and there’s no doubt Potter relished some of his final days when the pain-relieving morphine allowed.

Our hospices in this country perform an utterly fantastic job and I am full of admiration for the staff.

We are particularly blessed in this county.

But there comes a point when we should all be entitled to say enough is enough and opt for a death we believe we deserve, rather than one that is served to us.

First published at 11:27, Thursday, 04 February 2010
Published by http://www.newsandstar.co.uk