I watched as my parents faced their dignified, peaceful death - togetherAnushka Asthana
The Observer, Sunday 19 July 2009
Edward Downes, conductor at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, and his wife, Joan, and their new baby son, Caractacus. Photograph: PA
It was Good Friday and Boudicca Downes had just put her three-year-old son to bed. Her husband was preparing dinner in the kitchen of their flat when the phone rang and she answered to hear the voice of her father.
"He told me that my mum had cancer," said Boudicca, her voice wavering as she recalled the conversation with Sir Edward Downes, the world-famous conductor. "He told me of the last two weeks, of the checks mum had been having, and the various doctor appointments. And he told me the prognosis: a matter of months, possibly weeks. Then he just said, 'so we've decided, we're both going to Switzerland'."
Her 85-year-old father and his terminally ill wife, Joan, 74, would travel together from their London home to the Dignitas clinic in Zurich where they would be helped to fulfil their final desire - to commit suicide together. It was there that Boudicca, 39, and her brother Caractacus, 41, gripped their parents' hands as each swallowed a single dose of a lethal barbiturate. Within minutes Edward and his wife were dead. It was three months, to the day, since he had made that phone call to his daughter.
Sitting last week in the London house in which she grew up surrounded by shelves lined with thousands of her father's books, Boudicca took a deep breath and began to explain why she had supported her parents; why she had backed not just her mother, who had only a few, painful months left, but also her father, who may have lived for a decade or more.
"Mum was not frightened of dying, but she was frightened of a living death," she said. "She loved her life and she was infuriated by any type of illness, even a cold, by anything that sapped her energy levels because she had stuff to do," said Boudicca. "The idea of being increasingly weak, fragile and tired in the last weeks of her life were unbearable." Even at 74, Joan was the only person with more energy than her 3-year-old grandson, Zeki.
It is perhaps not difficult for people to understand why Boudicca supported her mother's decision to cut short a few painful, exhausting and soul-destroying months: days when she would no longer be able to smile at her daughter, play with her grandson or engage in intellectual conversation with her husband.
All Boudicca wanted for the woman who had loved her throughout her life was "a dignified death involving the least suffering possible".
But what about their father? "I understand why there have to be very careful regulations to protect the vulnerable," she said. "In my father's case, and I think in the case of many others, the issue is not the fact that you are about to die of a terminal illness in a certain number of weeks or months. It is that your life becomes unbearable because of physical or mental suffering. My father wasn't terminally ill, but he was 85, he had many health problems. He was in terrible, terrible pain and had been for a long time."
Boudicca described how hard it had been for her father to lose his sight and with it one of his greatest loves - reading. She looked around the room she was sitting in: "I am surrounded by thousands of books on every possible subject from history to art to languages to westerns. He was completely obsessed with books." But it was not just his eyesight.
Upstairs, in another room lined with orchestral scores and tapes, stood Edward's piano - a painful reminder to Boudicca of watching as her father's hearing began to slip away. Though he wore a hearing aid, it distorted the sounds around him.
"For someone with my father's ear, that was hard to bear," said Boudicca of the man who conducted the first night at the Sydney Opera House, led the BBC Philharmonic, and worked with the Royal Opera House Chorus and Orchestra for more than five decades...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2009/jul/19/dignitas-assisted-suicide-edward-downes
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