Thread by B-Chan
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I knew my mother Norma's 81st birthday would be poignant. She had been diagnosed with lung cancer six months earlier... and was not expected to survive the year.
But at least, I reasoned, she was being treated at the world-renowned Royal Marsden Hospital in West London. There she would not only receive the best possible treatment but be cared for by dedicated nurses accustomed to looking after the terminally ill...
But when I arrived on Horder Ward on the morning of my mother's birthday, she was distressed and disorientated. Instead of wearing the white linen pyjamas she had gone to bed in, she was wrapped in an NHS gown Gradually it emerged that she had woken up in the middle of the night in a pool of blood, terrified she was haemorrhaging. She had rung the bell next to her bed but there was no response.
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The death of Daniel James, the 23-year-old rugby player who visited a Swiss euthanasia clinic last month, is the most appalling burden his parents will ever have to bear, whether or not they are prosecuted, and whether or not they are sent to prison for what they did on his behalf.
They decided to believe him when he said that after he was paralysed in a scrum his life was of no value to him, and that he would prefer death. It was not a sudden decision but one taken over many months, during which he had shown, by attempting suicide, that he was in deadly earnest. They made a deliberate moral choice, and carried it out in what must have been an agonising journey to Switzerland. Their courage has been enormous; but it would be hard to deny that they acted unlawfully.
"We will not be silent.
We are your bad conscience.
The White Rose will give you no rest."