Nyta Mann was never famous. Few beyond her family and friends will register her passing. I am one of the few who remember her spiky, arch conversations and regret that I will never hear her again. Her death showed how hopeless I and perhaps modern society are at acknowledging suffering.

We can acknowledge victimhood. We manufacture victims like the Victorians manufactured heroes. Victims are comforting in their way because we can plan and, on occasion, achieve the removal of the forces that oppress them. The inequalities of wealth, power and gender are as nothing, however, when set against the greatest inequality of all. No reform or revolution can heal the divide between the well and the sick, which we will all stagger across one day.

In 2016, Nyta asked me to visit her. She was no longer in a hutch thrown up in the East End to cash in on London’s delirious property inflation, but in a fantastically expensive art deco apartment overlooking Hyde Park. She had cashed in everything so she could live like a princess for a few years. I soon learned why. She had multiple sclerosis in its most relentless form. Her body was going and perhaps her mind would follow.

Nyta made me promise two things. I was to join her for a farewell dinner in Switzerland the night before she went to the Dignitas clinic. In the interim, I was not even to try to persuade her to change her mind. I broke the second promise at once.

While he was dying from oesophageal cancer, Christopher Hitchens wrote that he no longer cited Nietzsche’s slogan “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” with the same conviction. As he was learning, patients in the rich world suffer conditions that leave them weaker and in more pain for longer than any previous generation endured.

Only the (temporarily) healthy, on the right side of the greatest inequality, can still dream the Nietzschean fantasy. We want stories of redemption. We talk of “struggles” against cancer and “fights” against diseases, as if mere fortitude can overthrow the suffering of the human condition. I shouldn’t need to add that our myths are self-serving. They allow us to imagine that we, at least, will have the guts and determination to recover when sickness strikes. I should recognise these comforting lies for what they are. I am allergic to the uses of what Tony Judt once called in another context “the cheating language of equality”. When a British government, which is closing services for mentally handicapped children, announces in its most politically correct voice that it is wrong to say “mentally handicapped children” rather than “children with a learning disability”, I see a modern version of Victorian cruelty deploying euphemism to cover cynicism.

Nevertheless, for all I knew, or thought I knew, I disobeyed Nyta’s instruction and argued with her. It is a human reaction, I think. If you see a stranger about to jump from the ledge, you try to talk her down. The desire to persuade her to choose life would only become more urgent if you discovered she was a dear friend. Nyta dismissed me with contempt. It was her decision. People who still inhabited the world of the well did not have the knowledge of suffering to question it.

The invitation to her farewell dinner came in May. I am not going to lie. I was relieved – immensely relieved – to discover that it fell in the middle of a prebooked holiday I could not cancel. I would not have known what to say or do. Death cannot be sanitised. Dignitas is a “clinic” that kills people. To kill a woman in a wheelchair, it needs collaborators to get the “patient” to the airport, the hotel and finally the clinic itself. Would I have collaborated? That was a question I didn’t want answered. Instead I phoned her.

“I’m calling to say goodbye.”

“Goodbye, then.”

“Oh Nyta.”

“Don’t ‘oh Nyta’ me. It’s what I want.”

One lesson from Nyta’s life needs to be learned now. Parliament will not be able to withstand the pressure from the public to make assisted suicide legal for long. If you plan your death, you must get the consent of all the people you will need to help you, as well as being absolutely sure that death is your desire. Nyta was adamant from the beginning to the end. She never complained or self-dramatised. Her Twitter feed made no mention of her coming suicide. Her last tweets were political, not personal. They merely recorded she was leaving the Labour party that she had served and reported on for decades because she could not stomach Corbyn’s endorsement of Brexit and his treatment of the Jews. Her stoicism makes her sound the “strong woman” all modern women are meant to be. But the language of “empowerment” cheats too.

Despite the advances of feminism, Nyta’s strength of mind didn’t help her in a world where spiky women are still meant to suppress their intellects. She was a political correspondent for the New Statesman in the 1990s. It broke her heart when it fired her in one of its periodic purges. (The vicious office politics of small magazines are always in inverse proportion to their circulation.) She moved to BBC Radio’s chatty news and sport station 5 Live, but couldn’t play along with its mandatory chirpiness and resigned. Talk of strength is in any case a lie when applied to the chronically sick. Suffering does not make you better.

So there lies Nyta Mann (1967-2018). I would raise a glass to you, but I’ve stopped drinking. I’d say a prayer for you, but I no more believed in primitive tales of god and gods than you did. The best I can do is say you died the way you lived: on your own terms. And how many of us will be able to claim that epitaph when our time comes?

• Nick Cohen is an Observer columnist