Member-only story
Who has the right to die? Why I’m wary of no-breaks euthanasia
Who should be allowed to end their lives?
A few years ago, I was the lowest I’d ever been. Unless you’ve been desperately unhappy, I don’t think there’s any way you could comprehend total and complete despair. My American fiancé and best friend of three years had called me while I was at a conference in Helsinki, doing a job I disliked to get a work visa so I could be with him. He had been dating other women behind my back, after I’d gone to bed, and he’d met someone his own age. The shock destroyed me. I somehow made it, numb, through the next few weeks alone in the USA, and came back to the UK when the darkness really hit.
My world was blown away, as if by a storm, and I had nothing. He was gone and he didn’t love me. Everything I thought my life would be was gone, at 25. Honestly: nothing has ever, ever hurt as much as what he did to me. I remember wanting to die. I absolutely, without question, would have chosen to die, and end the intense pain in my chest and profound grief forever. If you had handed me a cyanide capsule in those dark months, I would have taken it. That would have been my consenting, bodily, choice. And now, at 28, I am so, so glad that society and my medical system would not have let me do that.
