Posted on 01/18/2009 9:16:06 AM PST by wagglebee
Sophie Pandit breaks into a smile as she recalls a nervous meeting with Julie Walters last summer. The actress plays Sophies mother in a new film and they met after Sophie was invited on set during rehearsals. Dont worry, I wont do your mum with a Brummie accent, Julie had said mischievously, by way of an ice-breaker.
Sophie knew her mother would have approved. Throughout her life, Anne Turner was known for unleashing her wicked sense of humour to diffuse tension in difficult situations. This never stopped, even in the hours before her death.
Last summer, Sophie, 44, herself an actress, her brother Edward, 42, and sister Jessica, 40, were approached by the BBC, who wanted to make a film about their mothers extraordinary final years of life.
Three years ago next Saturday, Anne Turner, a 66-year-old retired doctor from Bath, made the journey to the Dignitas assisted suicide clinic in Zurich to take her own life after being diagnosed with progressive supranuclear palsy a rare, incurable degenerative condition similar to Parkinsons that gradually destroys nerve cells in the parts of the brain controlling eye movements, breathing and muscle co-ordination, eventually leading to paralysis, making the sufferer totally reliant on others.
This was a future Mum refused to accept and on the day she was diagnosed, she told me of her intention to commit suicide, says Sophie.
We were horrified and deeply upset but as a doctor, Mum was under no illusions about the outcome of her illness. She was a fiercely independent woman and she could not face losing that independence or being physically reliant on others.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
Even more so when someone "suicides" you.
People are free to do what they wish and to answer for the consequences, but the state isn't to remove legal barriers to all (or any) destructive behavior -- else their's no purpose for state.
On the other hand, if asked "whose life is it?" I would answer that it is mine. If I were facing a progressively more painful (physical, emotional, metal, psychological) end of life situation, I don't know if I would take my life, but certainly the option is there and mine to decide while I have still the mental facilities to make that decision. I would not want someone, family, friend or stranger to take that decision away from me.
Some argue that we treat our animals more humanely when we euthanize them rather than force them to endure whatever pains they may be suffering until death finally takes them. Yet, we often force a dying human to endure until death and/or treatments that won't cure them, but merely prolong their suffering. Who is being helped?
I read a House quote posted here yesterday that more or less said, "We are all dying, some more quickly than others." I don't watch that program very often, but that quote helped me find some perspective in dealing with all that's happened these last 18 months.
Up is down and down is up to the kulture of death.
How can unending pain with no hope of reprieve be considered life at all?
I say, either way you are playing God. You do not know, cannot know, what God has in store for yourself or others. To prolong life beyond what God has desired is playing god, to cut it short beyond what he has desired is also playing God.
And you do not know what he expects of you.
God could expect us to feebly clutch at life or to let go of this world for the promise of the other.
This was an individual’s choice. A doctor knows the ramifications of the disease.
We are all dying, just a matter of the who, what, when, where, why and how we face it. She appeared to face her mortality well.
A coward’s way out? Perhaps. Those who make the decision to die deserve to live more than those who feebly clutch at its sweetness.
Then you don't understand what "unalienable" means. Your life does not belong to you. It belongs to the Sovereign.
Well, as least that's the premise our Founders based America upon.
Remove that, and you've removed America's premise, its foundation.
Suicide is by its nature not only an attack on life, it is the destruction of what makes liberty possible.
See my profile.
“on the day she was diagnosed, she told me of her intention to commit suicide”
wow,. I would have gotten a second opinion, esp where this is Britian - where the NHS is a bit, well, terrible.
Christians cannot give that answer.
Nonsense.
God could expect us to feebly clutch at life or to let go of this world for the promise of the other.
Committing suicide IS NOT "letting go."
I wish a study would be made of the commonalities among people that get it have. My mother was the picture of health and I believe that she wouldn't have lasted as long if she hadn't have been so healthy before it struck.
If you don't believe that life is a gift from God, it would be easy to do what that doctor did.
My mother and I both believed that life is a gift, no matter what the condition.
If I am a religious person, then I may counter your positions and say that my soul belongs to God to do with as He may, but my life and the consequences of my decisions and actions are my own.
I once thought as you seem to, but have gone through too much lately that has challenged my beliefs and thinking. I may come back to something closer to your position, but I doubt that I will view things quite the same way as I did.
Suffering, my own, that of others and my empathy for them, has tempered my judgments and reminded me that there but for the grace of God, go I.
Yes, but many Christians live by that answer.
If this woman was an MD, p.o'd about how she might get too sick to travel to another country to be assisted in committing suicide, why didn't she just write herself a number of prescriptions for the barbituates she consumed, and kill herself? The children say she attempted a botched suicide prior to going. An MD who didn't know how to do away with herself?
Why did she need to haul herself and her children to a foreign country to have someone ASSIST her in committing suicide? Because quietly killing herself wouldn't have been an advertisement, let alone a film for the suicide clinic supported by atheists worldwide? Hmmmmm...
It’s a little like those poor people on 9/11 who jumped rather than allowing themselves to be burned alive. We don’t condemn them and it’s hard to condemn this poor lady.
Exactly! The agenda trumps all.
An instinctive reaction to IMMEDIATE death is totally different from premeditated actions.
There is a genetic component it seems. Having the genetics doesn’t mean you get it though.
A friend of mine is in the home health care field. I came to the same kind of struggle when he told me of a patient he had. I am not for suicide, but to think of the horrible suffering— sometimes for years — is just as bad.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.