I still wake up in the night, wishing I had killed my mother. But Keir Starmer is wrong



A.N. Wilson struggled to watch his mother's agonisingly slow death

When I wake up in the watches of the night, I still wish that I had killed my mother. In her late eighties, this spirited, independent, active (almost hyperactive) old lady began to slither downhill.

She found walking extremely difficult, being almost paralysed with excruciatingly painful osteoporosis.

A boyish woman who had once been a tennis player and lithe swimmer, she became a hunched little dwarf for whom every movement was agony. Her backbone became crumbling masonry and with each erosion of bone, her internal organs became squashed together so that digestion and breathing were difficult.

She was never heavily built but she began to lose weight, dipping beneath five stone. We all lived, in our family, from crisis to crisis.

She insisted upon living alone and turned down offers to share the houses of her children. Good for her. She wanted to be independent.

Then she had a fall. She developed pneumonia. It was obvious that Nature was saying the end had come.

I blame no one for what happened next. I just wish it had not happened.

Acting with the best possible motives, the hospital doctors decreed that she was too sick to be returned home, even though she and her three grown-up children had organised an efficient network of home carers.

At that point, it seemed immaterial where she was, since it seemed so obvious that she had a matter of days, at most weeks, to live.

She was moved from the excellent NHS hospital to a Westminster Care Home. Such was the skill of the nursing, and the efficacy of the antibiotics pumped into her, that the pneumonia was cured. She was given food to sip from a cup as if she was a baby and put on about a stone. The trouble was, she had become demented.

For a few months, I felt almost grateful that she did not know what was happening to her.



She still managed to reach for the telephone and there were distressing, and at the same time hilarious, calls in which she would accuse me, in my late 40s, and my brother, nearly 60, of having rummaged through her belongings and spread them all over the lawn outside her room.



She obviously thought we were children again.

When I asked what made her think we had done this, she said that I had been giving her the messages through the window, using semaphore flags.

the moments of comedy soon vanished because the dementia left her and she woke up to the nightmare of her existence in that 'home'.



My spruce, neat, clean, mother had become doubly incontinent. She could not get to the loo except on a zimmer frame, assisted by a pair of Bulgarian nurses. She terribly missed her house, her solitudes, the sea view from her bedroom, her books.



She had lost the energy to read. She was bored, everlastingly wretched. If I took her home for the middle hours of the day, the lavatorial humiliations were too awful, even though she was now swathed in nappies like a baby.



She was never happy for a single minute in those last years, until the last day when a kind of peace descended.

If only she had died before she reached this state! If only her hitherto dignified life had ended as nature so plainly meant it to end.



As I began by saying, I wish I had possessed the courage to smother her with a pillow, rather than leaving her in that living hell for over two years. Had the roles been reversed, I would have begged her to kill me.

My murderous thoughts for my mother were rekindled by Keir Starmer's announcement yesterday of his guidelines for assisted suicide.

Keir Starmer: His new guidelines are 'no help at all' according to A.N Wilson

I do not know whether my poor mother would have wanted an assisted suicide or not. All I know, since watching her agonisingly slow death, is that I would most definitely want to take my own life, or for someone to take it for me, before I reached this stage.

All around us there are human beings whose bodies and spirits have in reality reached the end, but who are kept alive often for many years by the wonders of modern medicine.

I see no virtue whatsoever in these terminal circumstances, in pretending that there is some mystical thing called 'life' which God or Morality have forbidden us to terminate.



The half-life of paralysis, and pain, and misery for all around you is no life at all. In my view it is far better to end it all in circumstances which are, if possible, in your control.

Obviously, when we reach these frail states, circumstances have begun to move beyond our control and we need the loving and expert assistance of our family or of the medical profession.

So yes, I would welcome the legalisation of assisted suicide in this country and would support any moves to bring it on to the statute books.

The trouble is that Keir Starmer's guidelines are no help at all - in fact, they mean we are in the ludicrous position of the law saying one thing and doing another.

Assisted suicide is illegal in Britain: it is wrong to go to Switzerland with your loved ones and help them to die. Even helping them on to the plane, knowing their intention, is illegal.

Yet, without going through the proper legislative process, Keir Starmer has been going round radio stations to make it clear that he thinks relatives should be allowed to assist members of their family to die.

Surely, if we have laws, we should abide by them. And if we wish to change laws, they should be changed in Parliament, not by lawyers in radio studios.



Increasing numbers of people in this country believe, like me, there is an overwhelming case for changing the law. The two objections to changing the law do not stand up.

One is that the system is open to abuse. It is claimed that unscrupulous carers or family will force sick or elderly patients to 'opt' for suicide because they do not want to be a burden.



But the sorry reality is that unscrupulous and unpleasant people will always abuse the weak and the elderly, whatever the law. Their malign activities will go on whether the assisted suicide is legalised or not.

The second objection to legalising assisted suicide is that there is often something noble about people suffering an illness for as long as nature or God decree.



There are those who cite the example of Jade Goody - a girl who lived in many ways a terrible and immoral life but who bravely used her terminal cancer to give her children a decent future.

Yet most cancer patients are not represented by Max Clifford and will not make a million from their prolonged deaths.



On the contrary, for many families the continuation of a terminally sick patient's lingering condition in expensive care can be ruinously expensive, especially if the relatives have to give up their jobs to become carers.

It is true that unscrupulous children might make parents feel that they are a burden. But the illness and decrepitude of some patients is often placing a burden - an intolerable burden - on families, making it impossible for them to live their lives and calling for reserves of goodness or sheer energy which they simply do not possess.

It is not immoral for carers and younger family members to feel entitled to a bit of a life apart from the agonising bedside, and I fail to see why the preservation of life in such circumstances is always to be seen as virtuous.

Obviously, any law on assisted suicide must protect the vulnerable and prevent their deaths against their will.



But beyond this, in a free society, it seems intolerable that grown-up sentient beings can not decide when to bring life to an end, without the added horror that those they love best will be criminalised.