AsI helped my husband Keith up from the floor, he asked confusedly, “How did I do that?”. He’d fallen a few times lately, and his toes had started twitching.
Sadly, tests confirmed he had Huntington’s disease – an inherited, incurable condition that damages nerve cells in the brain.
Soon Keith had to stop working, and our children Edward, Charlotte (then 16 and 13) and I rallied around, helping with everyday tasks such as cutting up his food.
After seven years, in 2017, Keith told me, “I don’t want to have someone bathe, dress and feed me. I want to go to Dignitas.” I’d heard about that place – a clinic in Switzerland that provided physician-assisted suicide for people with terminal illness. It was estimated that one Brit travels overseas for assisted dying every eight days. Sara Fenton, 61, explains how she helped husband Keith with his final wish one of the few clinics that allowed UK citizens to end their own lives, because assisted dying was illegal here. When he didn’t mention it again, I hoped that was it. But a few months later, Keith took an overdose. He survived, but it made me realise he was desperate. We’d been selfish wanting to keep him with us.
We used £12,000 of our savings and, after passing an assessment to prove he had the mental capacity to make this decision, a letter arrived confirming that Dignitas would help.
Suddenly he was like a different person. He wanted to go out to places and visit friends. “I finally feel back in control,” he said. But in the UK, assisting someone’s suicide was an offence punishable by 14 years in prison, and Keith was worried for us.
Two months later we flew to Zurich, and those next five days were some of the happiest we’d had as a
