Rosemary Walker can see the comforting silhouette of Noon Sun Hill from the bedroom window of her cottage on the edge of the Pennines. This is where the 71-year-old wants to die in the next few months, looking out on the landscape she has enjoyed for most of her life.
She could be surrounded by friends and loved ones, with a garden she planted in recent months spread out beneath her. But it is not going to happen. Instead, she is preparing to travel to Switzerland where strangers at Dignitas will help her end her life in a place that means nothing to her.
Unlike in Canada, parts of the US, the Netherlands, most of Australia, New Zealand, Luxembourg, Colombia, Switzerland, Austria, Spain and soon Portugal, assisted dying remains illegal in the UK. That is despite public opinion being consistently in favour of legalisation. MPs have spent half a year gathering evidence and are preparing to make recommendations to the government. Any change in the UK law will come too late for Rosemary.
It is a state of affairs that is “cruel and anachronistic”, said the former environmental health officer, lecturer and garden designer. In November 2021 she was diagnosed with incurable myeloma, a bone marrow cancer that has “ravaged” her, she said. She has spent weeks in hospital and so far has suffered eight spinal fractures.
“I will face pain and indignity and I don’t want that,” she said. “I don’t want that horrible end. It should be at a moment of my choosing, in my home and with my family of choice around me. One palliative care nurse said: ‘I’ll be there holding your hand.’ But I want to be able to choose to be with people who I love.”
She has been offered palliative care in the UK – a hospital bed, pain reduction medicine and the possibility of visits from loved ones. But she doesn’t want strangers around her, she said. She fears palliative care at home would mean “dying without dignity”. Kidney or other major organ failure are likely outcomes.
“I have had agency over my life, the whole of my adult life, and I wanted to have agency over death,” she said. “That was so important to me, so that’s when I started the Dignitas journey.”
But joining the 540 Britons who have already taken their own lives with Dignitas over the past two decades is not what she wants either.
“The current law is forcing me to choose a death I don’t want – hundreds of miles from home with strangers and none of us wants that,” she said.
Aside from the extensive bureaucracy and about £10,000 cost, the Swiss route means: “I have to end my life prematurely, because I have to be capable of traveling to Switzerland.”
So now, as well as struggling with an illness that has seriously limited her mobility, she faces the impossible task of identifying a day in the coming months after which she assesses she won’t be able to travel.
“I’ve got to balance the thing,” she said. “Don’t let this go too far.”
It would be so much better if she could just stay at home – a place she describes as her sanctuary – and make the decision to end her own life when the time is right, close to her friends and garden.
“I’m passionate about the fact that I’ve created this garden and I really want to be in it until October – that’s my ambition.”
“I don’t fear death, but I love my life and I want my death to be in the place that I love with the people that I love,” she said. “I am trying to maximise the time left and never waste a second.”
She is spending some of that time campaigning for reform. She attended a House of Lords reception where she spoke on behalf of the charity Dignity in Dying, which wants assisted dying to become legal in the UK, within strict parameters.
“Nothing I do or say can alter my circumstances, but I could alter circumstances for other people coming behind, like my friends and like this burgeoning population that is out there and has been let down by the NHS, which is just beleaguered,” she said.
Her myeloma was diagnosed late after treatment for rectal cancer.
Assisted dying laws would allow people to counteract a feeling of a lack of control caused by a stretched health service, she believes. Two-thirds of palliative care is funded by charities. Sue Ryder, a hospice charity, recently told MPs there are “huge gaps and unmet needs”.
“A government that is complacent about increasing inequalities in health is continuing to condone inequality in death,” Rosemary said.
After extensive paperwork, Dignitas has now given her the “green light” to travel to end her life in Switzerland when she figures the time is right.
There will be no view of the moors, but the arrangement at least means she can enjoy what is left of her life. “I hold the ace,” she said.
