To think Gill Pharaoh had the ideal end of life

You can make very similar arguments about abortion. External pressure from society, family and partners, financial and practical considerations feeding into decisions and women feeling they should abort.

Still though we have to accept that the alternative is preventing women who are sound of mind having autonomy over their bodies and that is completely unacceptable.

There is no easy way here but I will always defend bodily autonomy over those who look to restrict on the grounds that some people's choices can be manipulated. People can always be coerced and theoretically they could use this to justify removing all our choices and freedoms.

My DH has just turned 76. He is reasonably fit and well and happy like Pharaoh was. If he were to tell me that he felt his life was complete and wanted to die I would be devastated. And we don’t have children and grandchildren. I read that Pharaoh spent her last day sightseeing and having a last dinner with her partner. I would have found that unbearable. Of course if he was terminally ill and suffering it would be different. Or even if he were chronically depressed. But it is not normal to want to end a happy healthy life and we should not pretend that it is.

It isn't a goady thread as most people agree with OP's perspective according to the poll. It's obviously a mainstream and popular opinion. I voted that she was not being unreasonable.

That doesn't mean we should all kill ourselves to avoid a shitty end
OP never suggested we all should kill ourselves. It's more that she views it as an ideal end to life. You may disagree but does that mean you should be in the position to prevent her choosing the same for herself? I would argue you absolutely shouldn't.

I see huge parallels with abortion. Ultimately it's about body autonomy and accepting people's wishes. You might find their desires unpalatable, selfish or morally reprehensible but forcing someone to live that doesn't want to can also be viewed as all of these things.

People can't seem to get their head around the fact that a perfectly sane person can choose to end their life. They have simply had enough. We know people have different tolerance levels for everything else and yet we have some that insist that this isn't so for life. We know life can be unbelievably hard for some people and I can totally understand how I could get to the point of wanting to end it all if I became too ill (mentally or physically) or was staring in the face of continuous, imminent decline.

You would be unbelievably selfish to deny me the right to end my life in a civilised way and force me to live a life I don't want to live.

Goady thread. How old are you OP? Young obviously.

75 is not very elderly. It's old, it's an age at which you could die quite naturally but it feels a bit premature.

That woman was mentally ill and killed herself. Its sad for her family. I can't see that her doing it by her own volition would make it better for them.

The years 75 to 85 can be great, holidays and time to relax and do different things from work. The leisure years.

Being a widower is not nice. That poor man. He was robbed of her company in his old age. It's very selfish.

Yes we can all go suddenly downhill from any age. That doesn't mean we should all kill ourselves to avoid a shitty end.

For what it’s worth, I don’t think 75 is particularly “elderly” but the whole point about this woman being discussed is she didn’t want to become “very elderly”. Having been a palliative care nurse, she’d seen it and it wasn’t for her. For me, that is her choice. Who am I to dictate what she must do?
And, we allow for example, cancer patients to refuse further treatment, knowing that it means they will die (We do not allow them to do anything to hasten their death but stopping treatment usually means that they will die sooner) Do those of you who are so against assisted dying disagree with that too? Should we force those patients to continue undergoing treatment?
You need two psychiatrists to agree to section a patient. I cannot see why two psychiatrists cannot be involved to assess capacity, ensure a patient isn’t being coerced and sign off on assisted dying, if that is what the patient is choosing.
Both my parents had dementia by their mid 70s, both were aware in the early stages. Both would have chosen to end their life had it been an option, rather than decades of suffering and indignity.

My mother's life at 92 is pretty grim. I don't want it for myself. I'm not religious so only believe in the here and now. Who knows what choices I'll make as I age?

Of course we should all have the choice to make that decision. Just because someone has a different view and makes a different choice to you doesn’t make it wrong, just different. Honestly I don’t know why people get het up about this. While I don’t think 75 is old or past it, this lady felt that for her it was the time to go, and that’s fine with me, she has that choice.

Surely you’re missing the point. You may feel full of life in your 70s but not everyone does. This is simply about choices - how can that be distasteful?

Why selfish? Her husband even understood her reasoning. What's selfish is people who think they should dictate how and when another person should be able to end their life in a dignified manner in their later years, years some people don't even see. She clearly knew her own body and mind and knew she was declining. If anything like a stroke, dementia or cancer happened, she wouldn't have been fit enough to make the decision she did. You'd rather watch an elderly person die a horrific death than understand they want to avoid that. THAT is the epitome of selfish.

Some people will not feel that decline until much later, so their decision would be later. If we would allow assisted dying for the people with the conditions I have mentioned then no one would have to pre-emptively do what she did. You're not going to recover from terminal cancer or dementia, who would want to live like that? Who would want to watch their loved one go through that pain? My next door neighbour was in her 30s with young children when she found out she had cancer. She would not let her children see her because she became skeletal, but still had to die slowly with her wits about her and not seeing her very much loved children. She should have been given the option of assisted dying before she had to go through her horrific death.

It's not an option here at all, so there will be people who do this before they are in that position because they know if they get to that stage, there's no other way out apart from spending your remaining days in pain or fear.

The “ideal” end of life? Regardless of how anyone feels about euthanasia, it certainly doesn’t seem “ideal” to me. YABU.

Possibly. But OP is in her 40s so is old enough to know better.

And even 20 year olds must be aware that if people are now expected to work until they are 67, with talk of the pension age even being raised to 70, that 75 is by no means considered as extremely old and past it as OP seems to consider it.

75 is positively ancient @AnonymityAnonymity , when you're 20.
By the time you get to 74, you tend to view it differently. 😏

You just said you read her words - she gives her reasons there.

I don't really understand people who feel their opinions on other peoples lives are more important than the people’s own opinions so I’m going to leave it there.

I’m glad for her that she was able to live and die as she wished to.

Clearly you're not in the same position at all because you are already retired and you said you have a little bit of money 🫣 where are the similarities you speak of ? I'm genuinely confused and maybe you are too 😉.
My reasons for maybe considering this is my lack of provisions to be able to support myself, which in the future might be very precarious - I don't want to end up like my mum with dementia but with no one to take care of me - my mum has an amazing daughter 🤗 I am childfree.

Also, did you say you are in a country that has assisted dying, is that Canada? Anywho , I think you need to stop projecting your own situation and circumstances on to others ✌️.

@AnonymityAnonymity no-one is going to force you to do anything you don’t want to do. Why can’t you afford others the same courtesy?

Okay, I've read it and haven't changed my mind. To me she made a very selfish decision, but I respect that it was her decision to make. Life to me is something very precious, and so many people have to let go of it when they are nowhere near ready, and I've always felt that people who throw their life away for no good reason are beyond selfish. I could understand someone in mental turmoil, but not someone with her reasons.

So you haven’t read her words but you just decided her reasons. Okay.

If you look up the thread I have linked (at 22.36) to her written letter/document she left. I think it’s important to read what she had to say about it instead of deciding that you know better than she does.

Adding to say she was a nurse, and one of the qualities a good nurse must have is the ability to listen to people, to listen to what they say and to not judge them based on one’s own narrow experiences of one’s own life. We are all different and all have different experiences and different ideas of how we want our lives to be like.

I barely know anything about her, but it seems she was a fairly healthy woman who just decided she had had enough of living, and threw away a perfectly good life for no good reason. Not something I would ever contemplate.

We have assisted dying where I live, but you can't just decide you've had enough and go through with it.

@Doingtheboxerbeat

We're not the same.

Exactly!

Unfortunately there are many many threads on MN where it is assumed ALL older women are the same and their behaviour is described in very negative terms . And of course threads where pp assume ALL younger people are the same.

For OP to describe 75 as very elderly and to assume life isnt worth living past that age is shocking. The implication is actually quite frightening: Logan's Run springs to mind.

She was a palliative care nurse so she saw people struggling with painful and undignified death everyday. Most of us don't. So it was a perfectly rational fear for her to have and I don't see how any interventions would change that.

75 isn’t very elderly. It’s elderly. My grandmother was very elderly and she was physically fit and active until a couple of weeks before she died at 91.

I actually agree with assisted dying but surely you can see how a “no questions asked” system could very easily be abused or lead to people make decisions based on their skewed perception that they’re a burden.

@SquirrelGG @Yetone

Have any of you read Gill Pharaoh’s own words on this?

It's easy to rationalise assisted death as correct on each extremity of the decision making spectrum. So a person with all their facilties saying I'm done at 75, we say it's their life and their decision and not our business. A person with terminal cancer or dementia who has expressed exactly what they want and the trigger situation for it. Fine, we say. We put our animals out of pain so why not Granny.
But what about those who feel they are a burden on their family or who's family make them feel like a burden, or who aren't getting correct medical intervention so feel worse than they should about life. If you normalised assisted death then increasingly it becomes a solution for issues it was never envisaged for. Don't underestimate the psychological pressure families can put on elderly members; both implicit or explicit. Just because you wouldn't do it, doesn't mean there aren't those that would to get their inheritance, for example.

What utter crap!!! 75 is most certainly NOT very elderly. My neighbour is still working full time in a manual job at 77. Several of my friends are in their 70s and are living their lives much the same way as they always have, none of them is ill or frail and they are very busy. A woman here has just had her 109th birthday, and yet you think someone over 30 years younger is "very elderly".