Rebecca Wilcox, daughter of terminally ill TV legend Dame Esther Rantzen, tells us why she backs her mother’s decision to sign up to Swiss assisted-dying clinic Dignitas
When my mother, Dame Esther Rantzen, told The Today Podcast that she had joined assisted-dying clinic Dignitas, the statement echoed loudly through the UK media. ‘If the next scan says nothing is working, I might buzz off to Zurich,’ she told the Radio 4 show in December. The response was remarkable and it appeared that Mum had, once again, hit upon a hugely important issue, and dialled straight into another zeitgeist movement.
She had done this before, often leading the national conversation during her 21 years on BBC’s That’s Life, but now her campaigning has focused on a more personal subject. Her health is not great and her illness – stage four lung cancer – has no cure; the prognosis may lead to a painful death that might not be eased with palliative care and opioid painkillers.
Her diagnosis in January last year hit like a devastating storm. It was not something any of us was expecting to hear. Mum, who turns 84 this month, has been a force of nature for so long – fit, active, busy and brilliant right up until diagnosis knocked us all sideways. It may sound stupid, but Mum was so full of vim and vigour that I think we had all just started to think she would be with us forever. Obviously, we now had to grapple with a new reality, one in which every moment together is treasured.
The announcement that Mum had joined Dignitas was unexpected, not only for the public but also for me. I hadn’t realised she’d registered with them, not that I was surprised. I’ve always known – particularly since my father, the award-winning broadcaster Desmond Wilcox, signed his DNR – that staying alive under any circumstances was not the choice we wanted to make. My parents had a gift of making everything fun and magical but I knew neither would want to stick around if the physical pain of living surpassed the pleasure gained by being alive.
My mother has also always supported people’s right to choose how they live and die, and as a family we support however Mum wants to die. In fact, I believe we should be allowed to die with dignity, not in unendurable pain. Sadly, this isn’t always the case. Brave people, like the late Dame Diana Rigg and the sculptor Nicholas Dimbleby, have spoken of the indignities of dying from a degenerative disease, in pain, with incontinence, lapses in cognition, and an increase in confusion and fear. They shouldn’t have had to tell us these personal details to effect a change in the law and they certainly shouldn’t have had to suffer with it when there are gentler, kinder ways to die.
Everything I’ve been told by th
