‘It’s Gone on Too Long'

'Push me over the edge': Diana Rigg’s dying wishes in the grip of cancer.

I will never forget the look in my mother’s eyes that day near the end; the “north face of the Eiger”, as my family christened it. You have seen it in Game of Thrones, that look. As the Queen of Thorns, she used it to great effect. Fixing me with it for the first time in these last months, she said: “Rachie, it’s gone on too long – push me over the edge.”

She had by then been on end-of-life drugs for four days. I felt sick. I knew what she was asking me to do. I had made a promise when I was quite young, that I would one day put a pillow over my mother’s face if she ever asked me to. It was a joke for years. Until now. And I couldn’t do it. It was the one and only time she showed anger or bad temper in any of her suffering. She died the next day.

End of life is not for wimps. When Ma was very weak and the nurse came to insert her catheter, I sat listening from my bedroom next door. My mother still wanted dignity and privacy when she could get it. It was only afterwards that I realised the nurse had inserted it without offering anaesthetic cream or any local pain relief, but my mother was too tired to protest. I was furious. Unnecessary pain was the thing I’d promised I would protect her from. Unnecessary suffering. It was a promise that I could not keep.

Quite apart from the lack of bowel control, by the end her dehydration was such that her mouth was dry and cracked and horribly ulcerated. We dabbed it constantly with gel on a sponge atop a lollipop stick, but still she suffered. By the time the doctor said she could have the syringe driver to comfort her and to help her toward death, she had suffered as much as I have known any human to suffer. She was terribly weak and woefully thin. By the end it hurt her to even smile, let alone laugh. “I think I’ve rather gone off God,” she said slowly and painfully, the day before she died. “I think he’s fucking mean.”

I had known of my mother’s views on assisted dying for years. In her last few months she became increasingly adamant that the law should be changed, and so we recorded her statements on assisted dying to be released after her death. (...)

“I have cancer and it is everywhere, and I have been given six months to live,” she says. “Yet again we found ourselves in the bathroom this morning, my beloved daughter and I, half-laughing and half-crying, showering off together, and it was loving, and it was kind, but it shouldn’t happen.

“And if I could have beamed myself off this mortal coil at that moment, you bet I would’ve done it there and then.”

She adds that nobody talks about “how awful, how truly awful the details of this condition are, and the ignominy that is attached to it. Well, it’s high time they did. And it’s high time there was some movement in the law to give choice to people in my position. This means giving human beings true agency over their own bodies at the end of life. This means giving human beings political autonomy over their own death.” (...)

At her request I had explored every avenue. Dignitas, which she had been a supporter of, was a bureaucratic nightmare. My mother would be dead by the time she was allowed go to Switzerland to legally die. Then we discussed hiring a swanky house and a dodgy doctor. We discussed every possible scenario. We howled with laughter, of course, but came to the conclusion that it’s impossible to pop your own clogs without it being plainly barbaric or painfully inefficient.

I recorded her saying to the doctor who had delivered the bad news, “I will pursue, in the end, an end to my life that I have chosen.” Finally, she agreed to come home to live out her last, and to die with me and my family.

My boys welcomed her with open arms. She slept in her own bed, now in our house, in a room surrounded by her favourite pictures and her creature comforts; a radio by the bed and Narcisse perfume sprayed in abundance if she didn’t feel up to a shower. We put a telly in there which she hoped would, and indeed did, entice my son to hang out with her. I fed her when she wanted to be fed but never forced food on her. She loved those cold yoghurt drinks when solids became too much. After a while she had no appetite at all, and so she began to take control of her circumstances. Not eating was also a way of making sure she never needed the lavatory. (...)

But the truth is, in the initial aftermath of her death, the press and the public wanted to remember Diana Rigg as she once was. It was too soon to associate Emma Peel with physical decline, or the only Mrs James Bond with incontinence. But it was the indignity of incontinence which made my mother want to end her life. For her, and I know this isn’t the same for everybody, the tipping point in her quality of life was the inability to control her bowels. It depressed her so completely that her dignity was, on a daily basis, stretched beyond breaking point. She simply didn’t want to be here any more.

by Rachael Stirling, The Guardian |  Read more:

Images: The Avengers/Wikipedia/Moria

[ed. I don't know what factors will finally force a change in society - maybe just more people dying and loved ones experiencing that process - but it will happen, eventually. We're taught from the earliest of age to control ourselves, our impulses, our bodies. Then that control is wrested away when we need it the most and appropriated by the government. It's forced torture, and for who's benefit? Not the person dying, that's for sure. Band-aids like Dignitas simply exist to give the illusion of an alternative - workarounds with nearly insurmountable bureaucratic hurdles (eg., only 540 British people in the last 20 years). It's just insane cruelty. In this day and age.]

Diana Rigg will always be Mrs Peel to me. My first real crush. Obituary here.