A searingly honest and moving account in The Telegraph by a writer who has witnessed her mothers slide into dementia.
When I was about 10, she made me promise that I would kill her if ever she became either disabled or demented. She would say: “I have no fear of death, you know. But I want a dead death, not a living one.”
She has begged each of us in turn to take her to Switzerland, but we tell her that we couldn’t live with ourselves if we helped her to die, and she understands that. So we cowards get on with our own lives and try not to think about her too much. There used to be a time when she could have explained herself to her doctor. They could have given her morphine for the pain, just a little too much. But how much easier it is to innure oneself to someone else’s pain than to risk being struck off the medical register; how much easier it is to hide than to bear a bad conscience.
Source: The TelegraphÂ
Image Credit: istock photo
