Dame Joan Bakewell on assisted dying vote: "This is the chance to end such needless suffering"
Writing for Radio Times magazine, the broadcaster says that access to assisted dying becomes more relevant every year.
Dylan Thomas didn’t get it quite right. "Do not go gentle into that good night" was an exhortation to a dying parent from whom he could not bear to be parted. He urged them to "rage, rage against the dying of the light," not for their benefit but for his.
It was, selfishly, a concern for his own loss and separation rather any tranquillity he might have wished for them. But then the passion of attachment – child for parent, brother for sister – so often overrides the neutral but compassionate concern that anyone you love might die in the greatest comfort with the greatest peace of mind.
That is the point of assisted dying. The wording usually bestows on those with mental awareness and a terminal illness the right to have an assisted death. As I write, MPs have been told they will have a free vote on a bill to give terminally ill people in England and Wales the right to choose to end their life (Scotland is also considering changes to the law).
It is just the beginning of a process, but with polls showing that around two-thirds of voters in the UK support a change in the law, this is the chance to end such needless suffering.
Assisted dying has entered the law in many countries including Canada, Switzerland, New Zealand and Australia, as well as Oregon, California and Washington in the US. Some 400 million people around the world have access to such a choice.
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And that choice becomes more relevant year on year.
More and more people are living longer: In 2023, there were nearly 15,000 people in England and Wales over 100 years old – more than double the number in 2002. Why? The explanation seems to be improved diet, lifestyle (more exercise, less laziness!) and healthcare as a preoccupation of public institutions, newspapers and charities. Notice all those oldies jogging round our parks and lanes, not as sleek as the youngsters but calling up more resources of resolve and enthusiasm. And governments – both central and local – are keen on plans to keep people healthy for longer. It saves money for the NHS as well as improving their personal lives.
The Joan Bakewell Night on BBC4 this week, featuring my interviews with Nelson Mandela and Marcel Duchamp, has prompted me to look back at my own life. Nonetheless, death is the great inevitable, waiting for each of us. "See you down the road" sings Leonard Cohen to his erstwhile muse Marianne. It is better that we think more about death – our own as well as that of those we love – than ignore it and shut it out from our plans. It is not going away!
In 2016, I presented a Radio 4 series called We Need to Talk About Death (the episode I wanted to make, on assisted dying was vetoed) and found there were an inexhaustible number of ways of approaching the subject: the matter of wills, the house, the inheritance, who gets the gems, who gets the first edition, who has to pay off the debts. The matter of funerals, cremation, burial at sea, scattering of ashes.
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Above all there is the matter of how we feel. It is hard to contemplate the prospect of not being there: Kingsley Amis once protested to me: "How can I imagine not being, when just thinking it is evidence of my being?" Poets, theologians and philosophers have tangled over the centuries and in glorious challenging and beautiful ways with the very nature of lived experience. We, as members of the human race, have access to this abundance of thought, ideas and expression.
There is much richness to enjoy before we go!
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