In the Midst of Life

should simply accept that a hospitalised death is the price that must be paid.
    Euthanasia is not the same as suicide, which is no longer a criminal offence. On 9 July, 2009, Sir Edward and Lady Downes died in the Swiss clinic, Dignitas. Lady Downes was seventy-four, riddled with cancer, and had been told she had only a few weeks to live. Sir Edward was eighty-five. He was comparatively healthy, but his hearing and eyesight were going, and he was finding it increasingly difficult to cope with the infirmities of old age.
    Sir Edward had been a very distinguished opera conductor. I knew his name fifty years ago when I was a young girl haunting Covent Garden Opera House, queuing for hours for a cheap ticket. Edward Downes was a repetiteur in those days, occasionally taking the baton when someone fell sick. Later, he earned international acclaim. I was stunned to read of his death, and of the way it had occurred.
    This clinic, Dignitas, gives me the creeps. What sorts of people administer it? I shut my mind to such thoughts. But when it came to contemplating the death of Sir Edward, it seemed to me entirely logical. He had married the ballerina Joan Weston in 1955 and theirs was a true love match, lasting for fifty-four years. The thought of life without her must have been intolerable to him. Hadher illness come ten years earlier, when he was still conducting, he might have seen things differently. But at eighty-five, with his life’s work over, due to failing sight and hearing, and beset with the usual problems of old age, and above all, the loss of his wife, he wanted to go with her.
    In the olden days – as my grandchildren would say – a man like Sir Edward would probably not have survived for long after the death of his wife. Grief-laden, lost and disorientated, unable to cope, perhaps not eating, not taking care of himself, he would have wandered aimlessly around and ultimately ‘taken to his bed’, from which he would neither have had the strength nor the will to rise. No one would have been surprised. It would have been a welcome and merciful end to a long, happy, and fulfilled life.
    But we are not living in the olden days. We are living in the twenty-first century, when it is not lawful for an old man to die of old age. A team of doctors and nurses and social workers would have been on to him, assessing and monitoring every function of his mind and body. Dozens of things would have been found to be ‘wrong’ with him, for which drugs could be prescribed. Had he attempted to refuse treatment, psychiatrists would have been called in to assess his mental capacity. It could have gone on for years. Sir Edward was having none of it. He wanted to go with his wife, and he chose to do so in the only way that he felt he could.
    Less than a month after the deaths of Sir Edward and Lady Downes the Law Lords required the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) to clarify the law on assisted dying. Hitherto, to aid, abet or assist anyone to commit suicide had been a criminal offence with a maximum penalty of fourteen years in prison. However, no one in the UK has ever been prosecuted for doing so.
    In February 2010 the DPP confirmed that someone who was ‘wholly motivated by compassion’ should not be charged with a crime. This is one of six factors for prosecutors to consider as they decide on the merits of each case. Assisting suicide is still a criminal offence, but the new guidance means that it may not be regarded as being in the public interest to prosecute.
    Weare on the cusp of a seismic legal change concerning the condition of human life at its close. Events are moving so fast that, at the time of publication, this section of my writing may already be out of date.
    A Commission on Assisted Dying was set up in 2010 and is expected to continue until the end of 2011. After that it may well be that new legislation comes into place.

HELGA
     
    Is there anything more enduring than an old friendship? Beautiful, elegant … Helga will always be associated in my mind with Paris in the mid-1950s, where we both worked as
au pairs.
She was about twenty-eight, and I seven years younger. She was German, from Munich, where her father was an opera singer at the State Opera. The Nazi Party, the war, and the virtual destruction of Germany had overshadowed all her early life; she had known nothing else. Her mother had died, and, after the war, Helga and her sister were homeless - I never knew exactly why, because her father