Bruce Fogle: My mother's only option was to starve

'Mum was telling me she had decided to die.' Photo / Thinkstock

Opinion

"When life is a misery, you give your patients something," my 100-year-old mother, Aileen Breslin, told me in December, as she lay in her hospital bed, suffering intolerable physical and mental pain.

"Why can't you do the same for me?" She was absolutely right. When a life is no longer worth living, I bring that life to a painless end. I'm legally permitted to do because I'm a veterinarian - and the life I am ending is that of anything other than a human.

But now, as of last week, if you live in Canada, as my mother did, and thanks to the Canadian Supreme Court's resounding 9-0 judgment, people in her circumstances will be allowed to ask their physicians to help end their misery too. I can't help wondering if we should have the same right elsewhere.

Let me give you a little background to the circumstances I found myself in two months ago. Mum was a warm, articulate, instinctively intelligent and exasperatingly wordy woman. We ended up living thousands of miles apart, Mum in Toronto, me in London. Our telephone conversations never lasted less than 45 minutes. "She should teach breath control at Rada," my actress wife Julia once said.

Mum's phone calls were stream-of-consciousness monologues. Once her mouth left the runway, no one had a chance to interject. She was exasperating. She was a handful. Yet what she had to say was always lucid and sensible. "Bruce, are you telling your children you love them?" She never lost her exquisitely tuned emotional intelligence.

My parents were married for 67 years. Dad, a man of natural majesty and few words, could make or repair anything. He built our family's summer cottage on Lake Chemong in Peterborough, Ontario, drilling the well, laying the foundation, hammering every length of lumber. My son, writer and broadcaster Ben Fogle, says it was his summers at the lake that introduced him to the joy of the outdoors.

In the storm of emails from her nieces and nephews that filled my inbox in the last weeks of Mum's life, my cousins agreed on one fact. Aileen was born two generations too soon. Her father, my grandfather, was restless, moving Aileen and her nine older siblings from one small town to another in Ontario. Both he and her mother died while Aileen was in her teens, losses she never really came to terms with. Several of her brothers were studying at the University of Toronto at the time and, because she was young and a woman, they removed her from school to cook and care for them, something they later abundantly apologised for.

Then she met Dad in 1937. She couldn't face a marriage ceremony without parents, so they eloped in 1939, honeymooning in Ottawa. It took a lifetime of experience for her to come to terms with that relationship. In the last weeks of her life, when I asked if she had any regrets, she lucidly but - ever so sadly - told me: "I knew your father was a good man, but it needed him to die for me to understand what a good husband he was."

The summer cottage Dad built provided my parents' extended family with food, fishing and above all laughter. Between them, my parents had 16 brothers and sisters, and all of them went forth and multiplied. At Mum's 100th birthday party last August, she had her family laughing and crying at the same time. Ben called his grandmother the Duracell Bunny.

Back in 2012, Mum was up and walking a day after a fractured hip replacement when she was 98 years old. When she fell and fractured her other hip, last December, she had it replaced, but her body was too frail for any practical rehabilitation.

I spent each day with her in the hospital, reading her a memoir I'd just completed about the summer of 1954 at the cottage on Lake Chemong. Of course she was a central character in that memoir, so the stories I read to her were about a vivacious, sexy, bouncy young blonde.

"I had forgotten how much freedom I gave you and Robert," she reminded me, when I read her a line about my brother and I being called to lunch from wherever we might be by her ringing a cow bell first on the dock, then at the back of the cottage.

I questioned her doctors. "Surely a woman with that much energy can still be rehabilitated enough to get out of bed and into a wheelchair?" I queried. "I'm all used up." Mum interjected. "Can't you give me something?" Her doctors and nurses, all sympathetic, told her they would keep her comfortable. Weeks passed. Her pain was relentless.

Three weeks after her hip replacement, as the old year reached its end, she told me she wanted to speak with me in confidence. "You won't give me anything so I have decided to stop eating and drinking. What do you think?"

Mum was telling me she had decided to die. This time, she was only just ahead of her time. Thanks to that Canadian Supreme Court ruling, people in her circumstances will now be able to do so, painlessly, of their own free will, simply by asking for and taking pills, without putting themselves or their families through a needlessly protracted and inevitably uncomfortable end of life.

But Mum did not have that luxury. Her only option was to refuse food.

"Your mind is still more lucid than mine will ever be," I replied. "I don't want you to die but if you're asking my advice, I'd still drink."

"What should I drink?" Mum asked.

"Whatever you like." I replied. "Water, tea, coffee."

"Melissa's chicken soup?" she asked. Mel is her daughter-in-law.

"Of course," I answered, "but if you do, you will live longer."

Mum decided not to. I continued to read to her each day, giving her fluids when she was thirsty, and asked if there was anything she wanted me to say at her funeral.

"I heard all my obituaries at my 100th birthday party," she replied, then added: "Yes. Be content with what you have." I jotted that down on the back of an airport coffee shop receipt.

"Anything else?" I asked.

"Don't let petty squabbles obstruct your relationships."

"Anything else?"

"Have more sex. Tender touch is what we all need."

I winced a bit at that one. Parents never have sex, do they?

"Anything else?"

"Feel the grass under your bare feet. Listen to birdsong. Stop! Marvel at life!"

She passed away a few days later. And that evening, I happened to listen to some classical music: Smetana's symphonic poem Die Moldau. In it, the Vltava River that flows through Prague cascades then eddies and swirls then slows to a serene flow. The tranquil and still end of Smetana's symphony concludes with two unexpected, energetic and powerfully uplifting beats. "That's Mum!" streaked through my mind. I bawled like a newborn.

The end of her life should have been easier for her. And now I think how sad that the Canadian Supreme Court had not ruled as they have just done a year or more sooner. And should Britain not be following in Canada's footsteps? I think so - and without a doubt we will eventually.

I agree with Joanna Trollope, who said in an interview with The Daily Telegraph last week: "I would really hope by that stage the idea of assisted dying would have been debated and accepted to some degree. It's a logical thing but everyone's so terrified of being accused of murder that the medical profession has its hands tied."

In her last days, I read Mum the opening lines of Richard Dawkins's Unweaving the Rainbow.

"We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born... Certainly, those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?"

Mum told me that is exactly how she felt, and I read those lines at her funeral.

Bruce Fogle's Barefoot at the Lake: A Memoir of Summer People and Water Creatures is published in April.