WHERE IS THY STING?

When I was a boy, my maternal grandfather lived with us. Long a widower, he had done so as soon as my parents married and set up home together. It was the accepted thing in those days - my parents married in 1940. Essentially a positive person, his last years were certainly much enlivened by having an enquiring grandson to whom he could devote all his attention. He taught me to read (rather younger than the average) and fired my interest in history, geography, fiction and, in general terms, the world around me.

Grandpa had two old friends, contemporaries who each lived in a town not far away, and we would visit them once or twice a year. My dad never came with us. He found the notion of such visits a trial and anyway, as I’m sure he would emphasise, they weren’t his friends. As a little boy, I didn’t much relish these visits either but I wasn’t permitted to cry off. In particular, I dreaded calling on Mr Bruce and Alice. JS Bruce was a rather fearsome Victorian with a bristling white moustache, a bald dome and a quantity of lurking nose and ear hair. He was a widower with several daughters – at least three – and the plain, dim one remained a spinster and lived with him as timid, fussing housekeeper.

I don’t think my memory is playing tricks if I report that, as late as the mid-1950s, his semi-detached house was still lit only by gas. My grandfather, my mother and I would sit in the gloom, drinking the tea and eating the dismal sandwiches that Alice provided. Mr Bruce – I never knew his first name and their Christmas cards were always signed “JS Bruce and Alice”, even though their primary recipient was his good friend for more than half a century – presided, and we all took our cue from him. This meant frequent long pauses – interminable to a boy of seven or eight – while Mr Bruce slowly masticated his dry sponge cake and found nothing of import to remark. The grandfather clock ticked laboriously and seemingly deafeningly through these hiatuses.

Less of a trial were the trips to see May Allman. She was a charming old dame who always made a fuss of me and usually had some little gift to bestow. She had never married and had a younger woman living with her as paid companion, another one called Alice who was a plain spinster but certainly not dim. May and Alice seemed to get by on pretty much equal terms; whether there was anything more to it, it didn’t at that age occur to me to wonder. Then a calamity occurred. Alice died. Left alone and with no prospect of replacing her helpmeet, May struggled gamely on. The last time I saw her was, I think, after my grandfather had died just before my 14th birthday. He had enjoyed a long and happy life and had been in robust health and high spirits until the day he died. May, on the other hand, was now frail and apt to lose track. On the way home, my mother told me that May had drawn her aside and confided that all she wanted was to die.

May duly got her wish, as did JS Bruce and Alice, and indeed my mother and father; as we all shall. I have no idea what were the circumstances of May’s passing. As a teenager, I had much more pressing concerns. But the purposelessness of her lingering stayed with me. It seemed to me then, as it seems to me now, that a settled wish to hasten what is anyway inevitable is a perfectly reasonable position to take. If suicide were simple, as a practical proposition, there would be no need for the courts or the law lords to take a view. But it, like the issue, is not simple.

When I was in my middle 30s, a number of my friends killed themselves. One was my flat mate Phil, ten years younger than me and a sweet boy. He threw himself off the cliffs at Dover. Such was the damage done to his head on the rocks below that he was buried unidentified. It was six months before a dental match was made and then the Dover authorities refused to allow his bewildered parents to exhume the body and re-bury it where they wished. In the meantime, we had not known what had become of him or indeed whether he was alive. Some weeks after the identification was confirmed, I received a small jiffy bag. The postmark indicated that it came from the Dover police but there was nothing in the bag save a door key. It of course was Phil’s and examining it I now knew for sure that he was dead. The key was green. It had been in his pocket in the sea.

Like any thoughtful young man, I mused on suicide myself once or twice. But the means are the taskmaster that asks all the questions. Phil’s desperate leap demands a certainty about what you want to achieve and perhaps an innocence about the ramifications: I doubt that he would have intended his family, friends and lovers to pass six months in painful speculation about his disappearance. If there were a pleasant-tasting draft available at any supermarket that you could drink and that would then carry you into a painless sleep from which you would never awaken, millions of us would have gulped it down before we turned 40, many of us on the merest whim. But of course millions more would have fed it to someone else. That rather rules it out as a permissible, let alone a marketable product.

But this is exactly the problem with the notion of assisted suicide. At what point does assistance become coercion and who decides whether a line has been crossed and on what basis? Let’s first exclude the busybodies from the equation. These are the ones who have a fixed view of the world, characteristically one based on supernatural delusion, and who want to impose that view upon everyone else. Prominent among these are the groups who scandalously characterise themselves as “pro-life”, as if somehow everyone else is “anti-life”. Given that so-called pro-lifers are almost invariably subscribers to the full ticket of right-wing views, they tend also to advocate capital punishment, pre-emptive military strikes and armed responses, which makes them rather more comprehensively anti-life than I am.

Then there are some, to whom one is certainly obliged to pay attention, who are severely disabled or suffering from terminal illness and who want to protect themselves from officious assistance to suicide, because they fear on the one hand self-interest on the part of the putative assistants and on the other hand temporary weakness or suggestibility on their own part.

These are genuine fears and must be addressed. There are grey areas here in which, for instance, psychological pressure might be put on an elderly person about “being a burden”. At the same time, of course, not wanting to be a burden can be a genuine matter of concern and distress for a dependent. It is argued that a relaxation of the rules that protect the elderly from being put under undue pressure might lead to a climate in which the elderly are widely seen as constituting a burden on society. As one only three years away from the time when he will be defined as a pensioner, I do nothing to encourage such a prospect.

But like all matters of private morality, each case needs to be considered on its own merits and not according to some ordained blueprint of action, behaviour and prejudice. It ought to be possible for medical and other professionals to determine whether or how far an elderly dependent is being manipulated by someone who stands to gain financially or in other ways from that dependent’s hastened demise. One of the Any Questions? panellists this weekend made some play of the charges that Dignitas, the Swiss body that offers an assisted suicide service, makes for that service and the fact that the further expense of travelling renders the whole exercise a privilege of being comfortably off. I was unclear what he was arguing: does he suggest that assisted suicide ought to be available on the NHS? Perhaps Dignitas ought to offer a means-tested sliding scale.

Neither this nor any other is sufficient reason to disallow the proper support required from family members and other close parties in cases where someone severely disabled or terminally ill has no doubt that a willed end is necessary before physical and/or mental deterioration makes it impossible.

What is required is a climate and a system within which everybody is capable of being satisfied for their own circumstances, not according to some methodology or supposed morality advocated by others. Indeed, that is rather what obtains now, in practice if not in law. Dignitas has come about because there is a demand for it. Technically, those spouses, partners and other family members who have accompanied those wishing to die have breached the law. The law has compassionately winked. Debbie Purdy’s wholly understandable – indeed wholly admirable – attempt to “seek clarity” in order to ensure that her husband would not be penalised for taking her to Switzerland has forced the law lords’ hand. They have been obliged to make a ruling and they have ruled, rather unexpectedly but very properly, in favour of compassion and liberality. But of course they have united the opposition behind a cause. We cannot know how this will end. It ought not to end badly for Omar Puente, Purdy’s husband. But the Director of Public Prosecutions, Keir Starmer, now has to draft a policy. As Peter Hain said on Any Questions?, “I hope he’s not forced to clarify things in a rigid way”. On this as on so many matters of private morality, rigidity is the enemy of both compassion and good law. All the more reason to exclude the rigid god-botherers from playing any part in the process.