How I'm going to commit suicide by Brian Sewell: A shockingly honest (and beautifully elegant) confession by Britain's most celebrated art critic



Brian Sewell reveals his plans to commit suicide with gin and pills

The venerable critic does not see the virtue of 'merely existing'



Exit plan: Art critic Brian Sewell knows how and where he wants to die

Every night I swallow a handful of pills. In the morning and during the day I swallow others, haphazardly, for I am not always in the right place at the right time, but at night there is a ritual.



I undress. I clean my teeth. I wipe the mirror clear of splashes and see with some distaste the reflection of my decaying body, wondering that it ever had the impertinence to indulge in the pleasures of the flesh.



And then I take the pills. Some are for a heart that too often makes me feel that I have a misfiring single-cylinder diesel engine in my rib-cage.

Others are for the ordinary afflictions of age and still others ease the aches of old bones that creak and crunch. All in their way are poisons – that they do no harm is only a matter of dosage.



I intend, one day, to take an overdose. Not yet, for the experts at that friendly and understanding hospital, the Brompton in Kensington, manage my heart condition very well.



But the bone-rot will reach a point – not beyond endurance but beyond my willingness to endure it – when drugs prescribed to numb the pain so affect the functions of my brain that all the pleasures of music, art and books are dulled, and I merely exist.



An old buffer in a chair, sleeping and waking, sleeping and waking.



The thought of suicide is a great comfort, for it is what I shall employ if mere existence is ever all that I have. The difficulty will be that I must have the wit to identify the time, the weeks, the days, even the critical moment (for it will not be long) between my recognising the need to end my life and the loss of my physical ability to carry out the plan.

There is a plan. I know exactly what I want to do and where I want to do it – not at home, not in my own bed. I shall write a note addressed ‘To whom it may concern’ explaining that I am committing suicide, that I am in sound mind, that no one else has been involved and, if I am discovered before my heart has stopped, I do not want to be resuscitated.



Confronting death: Mr Sewell says that he one day intends to end his life and he finds it a 'great comfort'

With this note in my pocket, I shall leave the house and totter off to a bench – foolishly installed by the local authority on a road so heavy with traffic that no one ever sits there – make myself comfortable and down as many pills as I can with a bottle of Bombay Gin, the only spirit that I like, to send them on their way.



With luck, no one will notice me for hours – and if they do, will think me an old drunk. Some unfortunate athlete will find me, stiff with rigor, on his morning jog.



I have left my cadaver to a teaching hospital for the use and abuse of medical students – and my sole misgiving is that, having filled it with poisons, I may have rendered it useless.



There are those who damn the suicide for invading the prerogative of the Almighty. Many years, however, have passed since I abandoned the beliefs, observances and irrational prejudices of Christianity, and I have no moral or religious inhibitions against suicide.



I cherish the notion of dying easily and with my wits about me. I am 82 tomorrow and do not want to die a dribbling dotard waiting for the Queen’s congratulatory greeting in 2031.



Nor do I wish to cling to an increasingly wretched life made unconscionable misery by acute or chronic pain and the humiliations of nursing.



What virtue can there be in suffering, in impotent wretchedness, in the bedpans and pisspots, the feeding with a spoon, the baby talk, the dwindling mind and the senses slipping in and out of consciousness?



For those so affected, dying is a prolonged and degrading misadventure. ‘We can ease the pain,’ says another of this interregnum between life and death. But what of those who want to hurry on?



Then the theologian argues that a man must not play God and determine his own end and prates of the purification of the soul through suffering and pain.



But what if the dying man is atheist or agnostic or has lost his faith – must he suffer life longer because of the prejudice of a Christian theologian? And has it occurred to no theologian that God himself might inspire the thought of suicide – or is that too great a heresy?



Distinguished career: Mr Sewell at the Natural History Museum in London as a young critic

Suicide may even be a noble act. During the Battle of the Atlantic in the Second World War, there were many examples of suicidal heroism when men relinquished hold on dinghies or flotsam for the sake of other men, and swam away to die.



I have no doubt that in Afghanistan now some soldiers have taken suicidal risks for their peers in the platoon. Self-sacrifice may in such circumstances be a response more powerfully instinctive than self-preservation.



These are suicides whom we do not hesitate to honour. Surely self-sacrifice and suicide are different only in degree?



Why then do so many of us deplore the calculated suicides of those who see no point in the endurance of pain or the emptiness of a life maintained and conditioned by drugs, or a life simply not worth living?



My mother had an extraordinary will to live and, when the demons of dementia stormed her brain, she retreated into her girlhood and lived her early life again, while nurses attended to the functions of the shrivelled bag of bones that her body had become.



She was, in some wonderful way, content with what she had and determined to continue with it. But other women in my life offer very different examples.



Frances, told that chemotherapy might give her six more months and that without it she would die in three, kept her joyful wits and glossy hair and lapsed into unconsciousness at home, content to know that she was still beautiful.



Mary, swept into hospital with pancreatic cancer with only weeks to live, was given morphine, but contrived to increase the dose so that it killed her overnight. Lillian, on the other hand, a sometime ballet dancer, dying of old age, her frail body littered with the tubes and wires of medical salvation, woke from near-death to ask: ‘Oh God, am I still here?’ A cry for pity, yet she was compelled to endure another month before death naturally supervened.



It was Mary who introduced me to the idea of assisted dying, the then euphemism for an act of suicide of which the subject was incapable without help. She talked often of her wish to go quickly and easily when the time came, but had discovered that if she could not manage it herself, she could not rely on her doctor to do the deed.

Determined: Mr Sewell, pictured at home in London, wants Parliament to allow doctors to help patients end their own lives

The Zurich solution she found too complicated, cold and alien. ‘Will you give me the push?’ she asked. I gave her the answer she wished to hear, but had not the foggiest notion of how it could be done. I asked a doctor friend, but he adamantly refused to answer.



It is not fair to ask one’s doctor, for his oaths oblige him to do the very opposite. It is the doctor, indeed, who may save the life of the despairing suicide – the victim not of age, but of broken marriage or love affair, of failed career or bankrupt business, or the adolescent who feels disgraced by academic failure or sexual direction.

It was the 16th Century Spanish mystic St John of the Cross who in ‘the dark night of the soul’ conjured the perfect picture of despair as the point of stifling hopelessness beyond which nothing lies. This is suicide of a very different kind, from which, if discovered in time with understanding, sympathy and love, there may well be a dawn to the dark night.



But I speak for those of sound mind who have considered what is to be done with them if their bodies let them down in ways that are beyond endurance and who have left it too late to inflict death on themselves.



To ask close members of the family is not only to cast them into the deep, dark and ancient anguishes explored by the dramatists of classical Greece, but to put them in legal jeopardy. To ask a friend is to require of him the greatest act of love, for he too is vulnerable to the law.



In December 1997, Parliament debated the ‘Doctor Assisted Dying Bill’. This was to give those who suffer incurable illness, terminal illness or dire physical impairment the right to commit suicide when they are physically incapable of the act, calling on doctors to provide the means to pursue the execution.



Much talk was the immediate consequence, but no action followed. It is time to try again.



Could Parliament not at least pass a Bill that allows doctors to assist the dying of patients who, unquestionably lucid and articulate, have expressed an unequivocal and determined choice?



It is so simple – it is a living will, a witnessed legal document clearly expressing the wish to be put into the arms of Morpheus if we are stricken mute and motionless.