To think Gill Pharaoh had the ideal end of life

[CurdinHenry]

Article in the Times about this woman who decided to end her life through voluntary euthanasia at 75. Huge outrage on social media as a result as various people missing the point entirely express fury because they think being very elderly will be great fun. I personally don't want to get older than that. I don't ask anyone else to take the same view but it stresses me out that the naive want to reduce choices available to the prescient. Euthanasia should be available to everyone without condition.

It depends on the person. Some people at the gym I used to go to, in their seventh decade, were fitter than most 20 year olds, so I wouldn't say I wouldn't want to live beyond X age.
But I agree anyone should be able to have their life ended when they want. We should all have to give our wishes to a GP to be held on file (with safeguards) that if we can't do x/y/z we want euthanasia.
Abortion has been legalised (and was effectively sort of freely available for over 50 years) because we recognise women have rights over their bodies. So why not all men and women with regards to end of life care and choices?

I found her reasoning that she’d written.

https://www.mydeath-mydecision.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/MY-LAST-WORD-by-GMPMay-2015.pdf

Was the husband on one of the morning programmes maybe?

I think from 75 you should be given the option annually to end your life painlessly and with dignity.

My grandad said if there was a button he could push to end his life, he would have done it at 75
His last decade was just medications with side effects, and more meds to counter them. He needed dialysis, but did not want the inconvenience of it. His later years was just sitting in his armchair. He wanted more than that.

Yes this seems to be what happens to everyone now.
In my grandparents era (1970’s) you caught pneumonia/had a heart attack/got cancer and died in a very short space of time.
Nowadays advances in medicine mean people survive these things only to have another 10 years of ever worsening health in terrible pain merely existing rather than living.
I would like to choose when I go, I am terrified of getting dementia like my mum. It was a living hell.

I agree it should be our choice but I do hope not to feel very elderly at 75 as that's only eleven years away and I won't retire until I'm at least 67.

Maybe some people on here are ageist but I wouldn't class an entire forum as such - they are obviously speaking from their own experience.

For what it's worth my mum is 72 , has early stage dementia, can barely walk and a heap of other horrendous health conditions.
A lady I volunteered with a few weeks ago, the same age is training for a marathon and did a sponsored walk over hot coals, whilst my mum can barely make it to the toilet on time.

We're not the same.

I'm in much the same position, although I am retired and do have some money in the bank, but when it's gone it's gone. Unlike you however I don't think anything about my life now or in the future is "dire" and I hope to be here as long as possible.

I know several people in their 80s living great lives, ageing is not always as dreadful as some on MN seem to think.

I am not far from 75 and I have still got a list of places I want to visit, long haul, Europe and UK. I have a marathon walk planned.

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".

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.

@SquirrelGG @Yetone

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

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.

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.

@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.

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.

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.

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.

@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?

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 ✌️.

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.

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

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.

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