Susan Hampshire makes highly effective contribution to assisted dying debate

The scene she depicts in such element — stones in her pockets, a stiff drink taken, then plunging into the River Thames — may very well be from one of many gripping dramas for which three-time Emmy Award-winning actress Susan Hampshire is known.

However, what the octogenarian star of Nineteen Sixties BBC traditional The Forsyte Saga is describing are her plans, ought to the necessity come up, to finish her life — so determined is she to keep away from the struggling her two sisters skilled throughout their last weeks. Indeed, in 2020, Susan’s eldest sister, Jane, resorted to ravenous herself to dying to flee her ache.

Susan, 86, would like to keep away from the drastic motion she has given such thought to, and the inevitable upset it might trigger her household. Which is the rationale, whereas nonetheless in good well being and hoping to have a few years forward of her, she has develop into the newest high-profile particular person so as to add their voice to the rising refrain — which incorporates Dame Esther Rantzen and Baroness Joan Bakewell — calling for the legislation to be modified to permit these nearing the top of their lives the proper to die.

‘I’ve witnessed, hour by hour and week by week, my family members’ needs for a dignified finish being denied,’ Susan wrote in a submission to the House of Commons well being choose committee, which is contemplating the problem of assisted dying.

‘That trauma won’t ever go away me.’

While the committee’s findings and proposals are anticipated within the coming months, Susan’s highly effective phrases have resonated broadly, and this week she agreed to share the shifting tales behind them with the Daily Mail.

‘My sisters, who each pleaded with me to assist them die, spent their last weeks in horrible ache, losing away till they grew to become shells of themselves,’ says Susan tearfully, the pictures of their decline nonetheless etched vividly in her reminiscence.

‘That we, on this nation, haven’t any kinder various to ease folks on their means is, I feel, extremely merciless.

‘When a beloved one is writhing in agony, begging for assist and has just a few weeks to stay, why cannot we present compassion and provides them one thing to finish their struggling?

‘We’re kinder to animals on the finish than we’re to people, and but everyone knows that we should die. When we’re prepared for it and might’t bear one other minute of struggling, we needs to be allowed to go.’

Susan has lengthy been a supporter of the right-to-die motion, becoming a member of Exit International, the pro-voluntary euthanasia organisation, way back to the Nineteen Sixties, after witnessing each her mother and father endure agonising deaths from most cancers.

Her father had mind most cancers and her mom abdomen most cancers, they usually had been solely of their early 60s once they suffered what Susan describes as ‘appalling, agonising deaths’. It satisfied her then {that a} change within the legislation was wanted for individuals who wished to keep away from such struggling.

The topic of the proper to a pain-free, peaceable finish got here up usually over the following years when Susan met together with her sisters, Jane and Ann — 12 and 11 years her senior respectively — all three of whom lived a brief drive from each other in South-West London.

Haunted by their mother and father’ horribly troublesome deaths, all had been in settlement that, in the event that they, too, suffered painful and protracted terminal sicknesses, they’d ‘need to be put out of their distress’.

And so when, in 2020, aged 94 and having been bed-bound for a while after a fall, Jane grew to become so frail it was painful for her even to breathe, Susan was distressed, however not shocked, by her pleas.

She visited Jane a number of occasions per week, every time watching helplessly as her sister slipped additional into the psychological desperation that comes with excessive ache.

‘She took maintain of my hand and mentioned: ‘I can not stick with it. Can’t you get me a tablet?’ ‘ says Susan now.

‘I may see why she’d requested me — she would not have wished to burden her kids with that — however I defined that there was nothing I may do as a result of it might be unlawful.

‘It felt so merciless standing by, watching her endure. The solely consolation I may give was holding her hand, stroking her brow.’

Indeed, Jane’s struggling was so insufferable she selected the one means out she had — refusing to eat and ultimately declining fluids, too. It was an terrible technique to die, and for Susan, too, a form of torture, seeing Jane endure but additionally determined to not lose her.

She would attempt to tempt her with ‘tiny, delicate parts’ of poached salmon and crab meat, mashed greens and pureed potatoes, all of which Jane refused.

‘There aren’t any phrases to explain the awfulness of watching somebody you like dearly struggling a lot she would select to kill herself in the one means open to her,’ says Susan, her face crumpling.

In September 2020, 5 weeks after first declining diet, Jane slipped right into a coma earlier than her organs lastly failed and he or she died.

Along together with her grief, Susan was haunted by the sturdy perception that leaving her sister with no possibility however to starve herself to dying had been ‘past inhumane’.

When, lower than two years later, Susan discovered herself on the bedside of her different sister, Ann, who had rheumatoid arthritis and whose situation had additionally declined following a fall, aged 94, it felt like a horrible episode within the household’s historical past was repeating itself.

‘Ann stayed in hospital for a short while after the autumn and saved saying: ‘I’m not going to get any higher, simply assist me to skip this bit.’ Which I knew was a euphemism for ‘Help me to die’ ‘, remembers Susan.

‘Once again residence, she was bedridden, as frail as a chicken, and we needed to flip her in order that she did not get bedsores, however the ache was so excruciating she would scream out. She may hardly breathe because of a extreme chest an infection, and was in horrible, fixed, agony. She’d say, on this tiny voice, struggling to breathe: ‘Let me go. How did Jane do it?’ ‘

A last cruelty, Ann’s dying robbed her of the dignity she had so prized in life. ‘We’d sit together with her at night time and he or she’d be in torment. My niece would ring the district nurse to come back and provides her one thing to ease the ache, however actually she wished to die.’

Susan’s recollections of her sister on the finish usually are not of peaceable acceptance, nor final profound expressions of affection, however of anguish — a lady determined merely to be gone.

‘I bear in mind her making an attempt to squeeze my hand, however she was too weak, and mouthing ‘Please’ ‘, says Susan, overcome with emotion on the reminiscence.

‘It was heartbreaking. I’d inform her: ‘If I may do one thing I’d,’ and I’d ask the medical doctors and nurses to present her extra morphine, to make these last days bearable. But they needed to work inside the legislation and, in fact, it is their intuition to maintain folks alive.’

Ann lastly slipped away in September 2022, two years to the day after Jane had died.

Both Jane and Ann, like Susan, had been strong — ‘we had been battle infants’ — not the kind to pop tablets for an ache or ache, which made it all of the tougher for Susan to see them struggling a lot on the finish.

It was due to her involvement with the charity Dignity in Dying that Susan discovered herself making a submission to MPs on the committee presently analysing and contemplating medical and authorized info, in addition to oral and written proof submitted by members of the general public.

Under the Suicide Act 1961, anybody serving to or encouraging somebody to take their very own life in England or Wales may be prosecuted and, if discovered responsible of an offence, jailed for as much as 14 years.

Section two of the Act states that an individual commits an offence in the event that they perform ‘an act able to encouraging or helping the suicide or tried suicide of one other particular person, and the act was meant to encourage or help suicide or an try at suicide’.

In 2015, MPs voted overwhelmingly — by 330 votes to 118 — towards altering the legislation to permit medical doctors to assist terminally sick folks finish their lives. But campaigners are hoping the present inquiry could in the end end in one other Bill being put earlier than Parliament.

A big 80 per cent of the British public are mentioned to be in favour of assisted dying, which is authorized within the Netherlands, Belgium, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, in addition to some U.S. states. One concern raised by opponents is that any new legislation may very well be open to exploitation for nefarious causes, with some folks feeling pressured, or coerced, into selecting ‘the proper to die’.

However, Susan believes applicable laws would defend the susceptible in these circumstances, in addition to these begging to be spared a grisly finish.

She is, nonetheless, delicate to the truth that some religions — together with Catholicism and Islam — vehemently oppose any type of assisted dying, believing solely God has the proper to resolve when a life is over.

However, her personal expertise together with her sisters and fogeys — who, she says, suffered much more on the finish, as a result of palliative care was much less efficient again within the Nineteen Sixties — propels her on.

‘I’m not doing this as a result of I wished them to die; I beloved them dearly and, God is aware of, in the event that they had been alive now I’d be so glad. But that would not be truthful on them as a result of they had been struggling and begging to be allowed to go.

‘I simply assume the legislation is loopy, making folks undergo weeks of distress on the finish of their lives. It is completely important that people who find themselves of their proper minds and say, ‘I do not need this any extra’, are allowed the dignity to die with none extra struggling.’

Further compounding the ache of her sisters’ deaths, in February 2021, Susan additionally misplaced her husband of 40 years, the theatre impresario and philanthropist Sir Eddie Kulukundis, whom she had nursed at residence for 12 years, following his analysis with dementia.

His dying was additionally hastened by a fall at residence, which precipitated a damaged femur — however though he was bedridden, Eddie did not endure like his spouse’s sisters.

‘Dementia progressively led to his organs packing up, and his final weeks had been fairly terrible however, fortunately, he was not in ache and largely slept,’ says Susan. ‘He may not communicate and by no means expressed a want to die.

‘Had it been an possibility, although — and it is folks having the selection I’m arguing for — I’d have requested him if he wished to go.

‘He may nonetheless nod or shake his head in response to questions. Given his high quality of life, he would in all probability have mentioned ‘Yes’.’

Although wholesome and energetic, at 86 it’s maybe inevitable that Susan’s ideas generally flip to her personal demise.

She recognises it’s an intensely troublesome subject to broach with kids, who hate to think about a dad or mum’s dying, but additionally thinks it is important we focus on it brazenly earlier than the second comes.

She has one son — movie producer Christopher Granier-Deferre, 53, from her first marriage to French director and display screen author Pierre Granier-Deferre — who, she says, is effectively conscious of her needs.

‘I’ve been fascinated about this very critically for years and would think about travelling to Switzerland, to Dignitas, for a peaceable finish,’ she says. ‘But that has develop into very troublesome — you must have a terminal sickness, and you need to have somebody go together with you. And these individuals are then answerable for breaking the legislation.

‘I would not need to threat my son going through prosecution for accompanying me, and it might be very unhappy to die on the market alone.

‘I may put weights in my garments and bounce into the Thames in the course of the night time, however I feel it is in all probability very troublesome to keep away from somebody rescuing you.

‘Otherwise, I may go on a cruise and slip quietly off the again one night time, and nobody would know I’d gone till the morning. But then, you do not need the captain to be upset as a result of he is misplaced considered one of his passengers . . .’

Whatever views one would possibly maintain on the proper to die, listening to a lady, in her ninth decade, whose mind remains to be razor-sharp, agonising over which terrifying lonely finish is more likely to be most profitable, and trigger least upset, is distressing.

As if studying my ideas, she snaps out of her reverie: ‘I should not need to ponder leaping off the again of a cruise ship. We want a humane system through which a physician can prescribe one thing to make sure we meet our maker as painlessly and peacefully as attainable. That’s what I’m preventing for.’