When we were in our sixties, my friend Pat Kavanagh, the celebrated literary agent and wife of Booker-prize winning writer Julian Barnes, asked me if I thought about death. She did, she said, every day. I was amazed. I never thought about death at all, but now, in my eighties, it crosses my mind several times a day – not deliberately, just inserting itself into everything.
When the garden centre chap tells me to buy tiny saplings, I know I’ll be dead before the three-footers look anything like a copse. But he quotes the proverb, ‘Society thrives where wise men plant trees in whose shade they will never sit’ – so now, at home in the Cotswolds, we have a young orchard.
Every day, confronting my wall of necklaces and earrings, I think I should be getting rid of some of them, not adding to them. (But ‘not needing’ is not the same as ‘not wanting’, is it?) Every time I slap a hormone patch on my bum, I think of my doctor telling me (not because she believes it, she just needs to cover her back) that continuing with HRT in my eighties could be the death of me. I’ve been on it since my forties and thank it for my energy and generally upbeat attitude. If I die, I die, but it’s been a good life.
Other frequent thoughts are: how many more summers have I got? Can I risk signing another TV contract? How will I bear it if my husband John goes before me? Is that pain in my side/foot/back cancer? How long will I be able to climb these stairs?
These fleeting thoughts don’t really trouble me, but there’s no denying that I don’t have much time left. All the more reason to enjoy it and to spend the remaining time well. We need to make serious decisions, and do those things we’ve always wanted to, before ill-health and the loss of energy, or of mind, makes them impossible.
I still enjoy working and foreign holidays and evenings out. Nevertheless, conscious that I won’t always be so active, I’m forcing myself to prepare for a more sedentary old age by getting my affairs in order.
Every day, confronting my wall of necklaces and earrings, I think I should be getting rid of some of them, not adding to them
I want to save my family having to go through the horrors of watching me die slowly, especially as I am unlikely to be a brave sufferer
Until very recently, when I made a will, I thought too much about money. Will I last the seven years needed for the money I’ve given to my children to be free of inheritance tax? Will John have enough money to go on living in our lovely house? But having finally got my act together and done my best with money matters, these tedious thoughts no longer bother me.
The bottom line is my children will get what’s still left of my lolly when I pop my clogs, which won’t be much after what I hope will continue to be a spendthrift, merry old age. Thinking about one’s financial legacy is actually quite pleasant: giving people something they’ll be pleased with is generally gratifying. But planning for other aspects of death is not fun at all.
I think a lot about my death – mainly, I suppose, because I am anxious to avoid one like my poor brother David suffered. I want to save my family having to go through the horrors of watching me die slowly, especially as I am unlikely to be a brave sufferer. David died in his seventies from bone cancer, a particularly horrible disease because it doesn’t kill you: you have to wait for the cancer to spread to an organ for that.
In the meantime, it’s hell. His death was agonising. He was given morphine every four hours, and for the first three he would sleep peacefully or be his old self: cheerful, amusing, philosophical.
But during the last hour before the next dose, he would be weeping, groaning, sometimes screaming, or begging for an end.
Dreadful for him, of course, but appalling for his helpless family, and distressing for the other patients in the ward and for the nursing staff. He was in and out of hospital because he would discharge himself, get pneumonia, be re-admitted and given antibiotics, then recover and discharge himself again. He finally realised that the quickest way to die would be to refuse antibiotics and die of pneumonia, which is what he did. Dying from pneumonia means slow suffocation. You drown in your own phlegm as your lungs fill with liquid.
David had explicitly asked to be helped to die, several times. He knew what he was asking for, he knew he wouldn’t get better, and that his pain would certainly get worse.
Had assisted dying been a legal option for him, he could have died peacefully, surrounded by love and support, with enough morphine to still the pain all the time even if it carried the risk of killing him a few weeks earlier than the cancer intended. And his family’s memories of those last days would not have been of his trauma and suffering, and their inability to help him.
I think a lot about my death – mainly, I suppose, because I am anxious to avoid one like my poor brother David (pictured left aged 11) suffered
David had explicitly asked to be helped to die, several times – he knew what he was asking for, he knew he wouldn’t get better and that his pain would certainly get worse
As it is, his daughter’s recurring memory is of her failure to end his life when she could. She cannot forget sitting by his bed one night with a pillow on her lap, trying to summon the courage to end the gasping, struggling breath by suffocating him. But she could not bring herself kill her father. His widow suffered years of guilt remembering how she sat at his bedside, mentally begging: ‘Just die, Dave, please just die’.
David’s death got me trying to organise my own death and also got me campaigning for assisted dying to be legalised.
Too many old people are kept alive by a system designed to save life at all costs, even if it means repeated dashes to hospital, often violent resuscitations, more stays in hospital – when they just want to be at home. One answer to this might be to have ‘Do Not Resuscitate’ tattooed on your back and chest, but that seems a bit extreme.
But it is no good leaving instructions with your lawyer, or even your doctor, specifying that you do not want to be taken to hospital, or don’t want to be revived or kept artificially alive. They are unlikely to be there at the critical moment. A simple, brilliant idea is a Lions Club ‘Message In A Bottle’ available free from most GP surgeries or from the community organisation’s website.
You fill in the form with your personal details, medication and so on, and put it with, if you like, an Advanced Directive to Refuse Treatment (or ‘living will’, available online) into a small plastic canister in your fridge door. You also put an unobtrusive Lions’ logo sticker on your front door and another on your fridge. The emergency services are trained to look for the stickers and know to look in your fridge. This doesn’t make the grim bits of old age go away, but it does help on the peace-of-mind front. I recommend it.
Along with the necessary documents I will leave for my children is a trunk full of family photographs and a box of memorabilia I inherited and cannot bring myself to chuck: a great aunt’s wedding veil, a cream silk ‘romper’ (the precursor of the Babygro) that my brothers and I wore in turn as infants, and the letter my father wrote to my mother before he had an operation which he thought he might not survive.
I cannot resist quoting a line from it here: ‘First there was you, and still there is you, and steady throughout the whole 25 years I have always known that my blessing and my gift and my pride and my love and my life and my heart was you.’ That speaks of a truly happy marriage. I’ve also been blessed with two of those, for which I have two good men to thank.
I am hoping that in the next few years the proposed Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill, which is currently making its slow way through Parliament, will have made it into law.
If it has, I can stop plotting and planning how to achieve suicide while avoiding my relatives being arrested for assisting me in my getting out of an intolerable life.
The irony is that suicide is perfectly legal, but helping a suicide is not. Currently there are only three legal ways to end your life.
Opponents of the Assisted Dying Bill – chief among them my son Danny Kruger, MP for East Wiltshire – worry that the law will inevitably be widened to allow anyone to die
I am hoping that in the next few years the proposed Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill, which is currently making its slow way through Parliament, will have made it into law
The first is suicide (horrible for you and worse for your family); or you can go to Switzerland (expensive and awful, and you would need to travel by yourself because assistance is illegal, and probably well before you’d like because you need to be well enough to manage the journey). Or finally, you can put up with the pain and misery. Suicide, Switzerland or suffering. What a choice.
Of course, I don’t want to be driven to suicide. I want to die at home, in my own bed, surrounded by my nearest and dearest with plenty of painkillers so that I can say my goodbyes. And then, when I’m ready, I want to swallow a drug that will send me to sleep. Opponents of the Assisted Dying Bill – chief among them my son Danny Kruger, MP for East Wiltshire – worry that the law will inevitably be widened to allow anyone, maybe even children or those with temporary depression, to die (the slippery slope argument), or that vulnerable people will be coerced into asking for death when they don’t really want it. Daniel is a formidable opponent: intelligent, reasonable, a great speaker. But I believe his concerns are unfounded.
We know that in England something like 7,000 people a year die in pain that palliative care cannot alleviate.
Some argue that the increase in the number of people dying with assistance where it is legal proves that patients are being pressurised. But I believe that the popularity of the law, in countries that have the benefit of it, is proof of how well it is working, and how badly it is needed. No country which has passed such a law has ever rescinded it.
I do sometimes worry that if we ever get assisted dying made legal, there will be so many safeguards and checks around it that the process of getting permission to die could be so time -consuming, bureaucratic and soul-destroying for the patient and the patient’s family, that suicide might still be the best option.
I am seriously thinking of trying to find out the surest, most painless and simplest way to do it. It would have to be with the knowledge and agreement of my immediate family, so they can be with me if they want to be. But they cannot be helpers or accomplices, which would be illegal, and cannot assist with the research or the actual deed.
Of course, the best answer would be to legalise assisted dying. I see the matter in very simple terms: whose life is it anyway? Why do I not get a say? If we think it merciful to put a dying dog down, why can’t I have that too? Wouldn’t you rather your loved ones remembered the good times, not your agonising death?
As things stand today, if I was diagnosed with a disease that inevitably leads to a slow and excruciating death I’d spend a lot of time in fear and dread of the coming pain. But if I knew that when life became unbearable, I could step out of it, legally and peacefully without having to resort to a lonely suicide, I would hope to make the most of those last months or weeks, see the people I wanted to see, and leave my family with happy, rather than horrific, memories of my final days.
- © Prue Leith, 2026
- Adapted from Being Old… And Learning To Love It! by Prue Leith, to be published by Short Books on February 26, priced £20. To order a copy for £18 (offer valid to February 28; UK p&p free on orders over £25), visit mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937.
Faux pas that broke the ice with the Queen
When the Queen walked in surrounded by small dogs, I said at once, ‘Oh how wonderful Ma’am, you’ve brought the corgies.’
Being South African – and therefore not really understanding the English class system – has been a help in my life as I’ve often, to my surprise, found myself mixing with the crème de la crème. And if you don’t know the rules, you can break them to your advantage.
I was once asked to Buckingham Palace to one of the small private lunches the late Queen and Prince Philip would give to get to know ordinary folk. We were told it was not done to initiate a conversation with the monarch: she must lead.
Of course, I promptly forgot this, and when the Queen walked in surrounded by small dogs, I said at once, ‘Oh how wonderful Ma’am, you’ve brought the corgies.’
‘They aren’t corgies,’ she replied, ‘they’re dorgies, a cross between a corgi and a dachshund’. She then talked enthusiastically about breeding dogs, about which she was an expert.
We’d never have had a proper, animated and enjoyable conversation if I hadn’t been so crass as to break the protocol rules.
My lack of sensitivity doesn’t always end so well. Once, at dinner, I was introduced to the then Duchess of Marlborough, the 11th Duke’s second wife. She was sitting on a blue sofa, wearing a blue gown, with blue wallpaper behind her.
She looked wonderful, and I said something like, ‘You look such a picture there, a symphony in blue’, to which I got the frosty retort, ‘Do you always make such personal remarks?’ Apparently, I needed to be introduced before addressing her at all. Oh well.
When I’d been honoured with a CBE, I decided to wear my gong in my cleavage to the annual dinner in honour of the foreign ambassadors to the UK. It’s a white-tie affair and hugely grand, and the only event I’ve been asked to attend with ‘decorations will be worn’ on the invitation. The CBE gong for women is backed by a large pretty pink ribbon, which I thought would make my rather-too-low neckline more modest. Well, I hadn’t walked two yards into the foyer of the event when an old boy, his chest full of military braid and medals, stopped me and said, ‘Madam, you cannot wear your CBE there. It must be on the left shoulder.’ And off he strode.
What nonsense, I thought. I’ll wear it where I like. But I hadn’t advanced more than a few more feet, when another chap, equally grand, told me the same thing. I got the message, scuttled to the ladies, and pinned my decoration on my left shoulder. Too bad about the excessive cleavage.
It’s all about your attitude
At times, my darling husband John maddens me, mainly because I am neurotically tidy and he scatters his possessions – but I love him to bits, so it’s all good
Attitude is everything – and you can improve it with a bit of positive thinking.
My mother used to tell us children to ‘put a smile on it’ when we were grumpy. If I was scowling at the dinner table, she would catch my eye and with both hands, mime the action of grabbing the corners of her mouth and tying a bow on the top of her head, as if to lift the mouth into a smile and fix it there.
Her theory was that if you acted cheerful, you would become cheerful. And it does work. If you are wrinkly and your mouth has gone south like everything else, smiling smooths your face out and makes you look years younger.
However, it does require the one who is miserable to want to be happy. Very often there is something indulgent, almost enjoyable, about wallowing in perceived misery.
But who wants to be thought of as a miserable old git? Some old people seem to be perpetually angry about everything, almost looking for things to complain about, which does not make them much fun to be with. But we instinctively warm to people who can laugh off small inconveniences rather than exaggerate them into tragedies.
It’s not always possible to will oneself to be happy, but making the effort to ‘snap out of it’ can sometimes work.
Occasionally I need to remind myself of what really matters and try not to get irritated by the things that really don’t.
At times, my darling husband John maddens me, mainly because I am neurotically tidy and he scatters his possessions (especially his shoes, of which he must have 40 pairs, many identical) all over the place. I have learnt, I hope, to ignore the mess, or just tidy up after him and tell myself he’s worth it. He’s 80 years old, so there’s no hope of his learning new tricks.
Occasionally I lose it, yelling like a fishwife, and he becomes distant and cool. Then it’s a case of deep breath, bottle it, walk round the garden and wait for equilibrium and mutual warmth to return – which can take a while. I guess he does the same when I drive him nuts. But I love him to bits, so it’s all good.