On Letting Go

A week or so ago I received a box of books from Bloomsbury. These were my author copies of my final book with Wendy Mitchell. The book is entitled One Last Thing – How to Live With The End in Mind, and it is out in paperback on February 29. I felt very emotional as I opened them, more so than I had done with any other box of books, including my own novel.

This is a book that Wendy and I are very proud of. It tackles big issues surrounding death, progressive and terminal illnesses, and a large part of this book is the case for assisted dying.

Many of you will know that I have worked with Wendy for the last eight years and during that time we have written three books together, Somebody I Used To Know, What I Wish People Knew About Dementia, and this final book, One Last Thing. These books have had successes that we could never have dreamt of when we met for the first time in 2016 at Kings Cross Station in London, me in my ‘wacky’ coat, as Wendy always puts it (it was a leopard print coat).

She has changed my life, and I have changed hers.

What started as a ghosting project with her memoir, became a co-author relationship – I don’t think Wendy will mind me saying that there was a little bit of me in her books too, particularly this last one. More importantly it became a friendship, that’s the bit that changed my life more than anything.

Wendy and I have much in common (mostly our sense of humour) but also our belief that people should have to right to choose how and when they die, and that they should be supported not only in their decision-making, but in the process itself.

Wendy has written in the Daily Mail today about her thoughts on this, and you can read that brave and moving piece here. They’ve even put her on the front page.

But I also wanted to share with you something personal that I wrote ten years ago in the same newspaper about my stepfather’s death which might give you an idea about why I think assisted dying should be made legal in this country and why this book means so much to me. But, most importantly, my piece is about why I believe that sometimes letting go of our loved ones is the right thing to do even when our hearts are breaking.

Have a read…

Whenever my stepfather, David (Dai to me) had a drink when I was a teenager, he’d start off in a great mood, reeling off his extensive repertoire of silly jokes, playing the spoons and making everyone laugh. But inevitably, after more drink, he would turn to the same old subject: death. More specifically, his death.

Dai’s monologue soon became familiar; how he never wanted to get old, that he wouldn’t be able to stand being diagnosed with a terminal illness — and abhorred the thought of being wheelchair-bound.

My younger brother and I would roll our eyes, our mum would tease him that he wasn’t going anywhere, but these conversations turned out to be more poignant than any of us realised back then, because, years later, the three of us found ourselves sitting at Dai’s bedside as he lay unconscious, wired up to a ventilator — a machine pumping every breath into him — and we had to decide whether to turn it off.

And with heavy hearts, we did.

Controversial though it might sound, it is my belief that we granted him the greatest gift of all. We did what he would have wanted, rather than cling on to him simply because we were too heartbroken to say goodbye.

It is common in those terrible scenarios for families to cling onto hope – quite understandably – and I know we did, at first. However, I believe hope can lead us down the wrong path, that sometimes it exists only in our hearts, rather than our heads. And it’s in those traumatic times, faced with losing those closest to us, and when their lives are in our hands, that we need to take decisions based not on emotion but on cold, hard facts.

To that end I believe that sometimes, if you love someone, you’ve got to let them go. That’s what me and my family did, and there’s not been a day since that I’ve regretted it because he told us so many times in those drunken conversatons that it’s what he would have wanted.

Dai came into my life when I was just five, after my parents’ marriage broke up. It was the early Eighties and he quickly worked out that the way to my heart was through endless toys and gifts, whether it was the latest Sindy or Pac-Man game. He would spend hours painstakingly perfecting my school projects with me, we’d fake wrestle on the living-room floor on Saturday afternoons while Big Daddy did the real thing on TV, and he’d embarrass me by shouting my nickname ‘Roo Roo’ across the school playground.

When I was seven I got mumps and here he is pretending to look like me with my puffy cheeks.

Even in my thirties I’d find a fake plastic lizard or some such silly thing in my handbag after returning to our family home for the weekend. His idea of a little joke.

Dai was ‘Dad’ to me. That’s why I chose him to give me away when I got married when I was 23, despite my biological dad still being alive.

‘A real dad is the one who is there for you day after day after day,’ I texted to Dai on the last ever Father’s Day we spent together.

He was always fit and healthy — a passionate advocate of fruit and veg — and he cycled to and from work every day.  He retired from his factory supervisor role in 2009 and he did slow down, a little, but it was highly unusual for him to not be able to shift a cough and virus that struck him down in March 2010.

A couple of days later — on a Monday morning — I got a call from my brother to say Dai had collapsed at home and an ambulance had taken him to hospital.

I raced out of my London magazine office and got a train to Peterborough while my brother did the same from Brighton. When I arrived at A&E, my devastated mother said that Dai had suffered two cardiac arrests and was in an induced coma while machines kept him alive.

Doctors never found an answer to why his body had failed him so catastrophically. His heart — in fact, all of his organs — were giving up on him, and he was only 63.

The cramped waiting room for the intensive-care unit, with its endless cups of tea and hushed voices, was our home for the next three days.

On the first day, I was too upset to sit by Dai’s bedside, but the following day, when doctors decided to bring him round, my brother and I waited patiently next to him for some sign of life. Sometimes his fingers might twitch and we’d jump out of our skin, but mostly he was completely unresponsive. It was terrifying and bewildering.

First we were told to prepare ourselves for the worst, that each organ was closing down, then there seemed to be good news — he was attempting to open his eyes.

Yet this frightened me, too. Because none of us knew if he would still be the Dai we all loved. There was a strong possibility he’d suffered irreparable brain damage. My worst fear was that he’d be trapped in a vegetative state.

I remembered all of his monologues about death that we’d sat through, and I knew that unless we could guarantee he’d leave hospital as the man we’d known — independent and able-bodied — he wouldn’t want to leave at all.

I asked the doctors if they were attaching some emotional significance to someone ‘attempting’ to open their eyes and whether it was medically any more significant than, say, a slight increase in kidney function.

While any decision was ultimately for the doctors and my mum to take, I felt the weight of responsibility for Dai’s life in my hands. Surely we had to put our emotions aside and do what was right for him?

Another day went by and there were no other signs of life, the medical evidence suggested his organs were closing down, so the three of us made the decision to let him go.

The risks of him coming back with severe brain damage were too huge, his future too uncertain and, more than anything, I knew he’d never forgive us for making him stay against his wishes.

The doctors found it hard to accept our decision. That’s understandable, as they’d worked tirelessly to save him, but they also admitted that many families begged them to do whatever they could and then regretted it six months or a year down the line when their loved one had no quality of life.

One doctor eventually told us we were doing the right thing — it was devastatingly sad but true.

So we said our goodbyes and I watched my mum kiss her husband of 30 years for the last time. He died just 30 minutes after all the tubes had been removed – the fact he had gone so quickly was proof again to me that we’d done the right thing. We drove home, mute with shock. We did what Dai would have wanted, but it wasn’t what we wanted. We wanted him to stay with us, we wanted him home, we wanted life to be back to how it always had been.

But life never stays the same, however much you might wish it would.

I never imagined as I skipped beside Dai when I was five, my small hand in his, that one day his life would be in our hands. But, in the end, I believe letting him go was the ultimate act of love.

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