Next Gen News

This is the context in which we talk – or don't talk – about death. Legal types still use "passing over", which I find creepy and ghostly. Each profession has its own discourse and some medics are honest to the point of brutality. The best doctors I have encountered have been at the worst of times. Those in the hospice where my mother died made no pretence, and therefore ensured enough diamorphine for her to be unconscious. After the torture of hospital where "palliative care" was a theory not a practice, this was a relief.

Making preparation for one's dying, however, has now become bizarrely politicised, as the reaction to Terry Pratchett's extraordinary film, Choosing to Die, has shown. We saw Peter Smedley, who had motor neurone disease, go to Dignitas in Swtizerland, drink poison and die. Sure, he and his incredible wife were all stiff, upper-crust charm, but they were fearless, as was the film.

The ideal remains "slipping away". Some do. My nana died in her sleep. My grandad's watch stopped at the exact time. Once, on a bus, the conductor asked me to nudge the woman next to me as we had reached the last stop, and indeed she had. I could not wake her. Nor could the ambulance men. So she had died next to me, by which I was embarrassed. It wasn't till someone else started boasting about seeing a dead body did I realise that I had seen one. Callow, yes. Uncomprehending, yes.

Not wanting to die on a bus was my main reaction. It's a bit undignified, and all that resuscitation in public? No thanks! Now I have lived a bit more, I simply do not want to die in agony or waste away. Please don't tell me it's not like that, as experience tells me different.