Man with cancer once wanted assisted suicide, but was glad he chose natural death instead

Assisted suicide continues to rage across the globe, with legalization in more and more countries as death advocacy organizations push for people with cancer, disabilities, and illness to be able to take their own lives with the help of a physician. One man planned to travel to a euthanasia clinic, but his wife convinced him to live until his natural death. She is now campaigning against assisted death.

Nadine Dorries wrote in a column for the Daily Mail that she and her husband Paul were shocked and heartbroken when he was diagnosed with bowel cancer. Worse, the cancer was terminal; his tumor was inoperable, and he was given just four months to live. “It felt as if the ground was opening up beneath us,” Dorries wrote. “We had three beautiful daughters and were the closest of families: how could we cope with this? How could we inflict this devastating news on our girls? The tears came as the shock suddenly hit us both. It was some time before I could drive.”

Her husband, meanwhile, was especially terrified. “I can’t do this,” he said. “I can’t do it to the girls, or to you. I saw how my dad died with bowel cancer and what my mum went through. I want to go to Dignitas. Now, while I still can.”

Dignitas is a Switzerland-based organization that kills individuals via assisted suicide and euthanasia for all manner of reasons; one of its “clients,” for example, was an elderly woman killed because she was lonely, depressed, and distraught over losing her looks. She was otherwise physically healthy. Her family didn’t know anything about her decision to die until they received her ashes and death certificate from Dignitas.

Dorries’ husband Paul was ruled out for an assisted suicide at Dignitas, something he ultimately was grateful for. “His death WAS a good one — and, despite his fears, he DID enjoy his last days. But he chose to quicken his end by not having chemotherapy, which would have given him the extra months I so wish we had been able to have together,” she said. “Paul was never alone. Our daughters moved back home and the house was filled with friends and laughter, memories, music, the dogs on his bed and hours of conversation. A hospital bed arrived along with a plethora of equipment. His oral morphine and anti-anxiety medication made him funnier than ever and kept him totally free from pain.”

And despite the common rhetoric from assisted suicide advocates, Dorries said Paul wasn’t suffering in his final moments:

It was us who were suffering. He was pain free but we weren’t. Grief is the price we pay for love, and it cannot be avoided, no matter how or where or when the end arrives,” she continued. “In our last moments, when he was awake, I sat on his bed and sang to him — Joni Mitchell’s Both Sides Now. He had watched her sing it at the Isle of Wight pop festival and it was a magical memory he had relived with us.

Tears ran down both our faces, my daughter photographed us. Somehow we all knew this was it. His last words to me were that the past few months had been the best of his life, and he didn’t want to leave us. He said he only wished we had longer, that he loved me. Then he closed his eyes and slept for three peaceful days before he left us for good.

She concluded, “He didn’t die in a clinical setting in Switzerland, but at home in our arms. And at the end, that was exactly where he wanted to be.”

READ: Minnesota’s Bishop Barron warns against state’s push to legalize assisted suicide

Dorries has since grown in her opposition to the legalization of assisted suicide, instead calling for better support and funding for things like hospice and palliative care, so everyone can have what she called a “good death.” She further pointed out the difference between a death like Paul’s, and one which people would experience at a place like Dignitas, noting that not allowing people to die peacefully while pushing assisted suicide amounts to nothing more than a cost-cutting measure.

“The truth is that there is no need for anyone to have a bad death or to die in pain today. Medication is sophisticated and palliative care services are down to the Government, the NHS and the local care commissioning boards which manage palliative care funding,” she explained. “Responsibility for providing access to palliative care and pain relief lies with the state, and Parliament should not allow any government to shirk its responsibility by legalising a cheap shortcut to the end of life. Today, those with a terminal illness can meet their end peacefully on a morphine syringe-driver, whether at home or in a hospice or hospital. By contrast, the end of life medication administered at Dignitas, a drug taken in 60ml of water and swallowed, does not, to my mind, result in a peaceful end. It is sudden, brutal, clinical and, I imagine, distressing for those who have to watch. And it surely leaves loved ones with an end-of-life memory many would rather not have.”

Though assisted suicide is often said to be a peaceful and painless way of dying, the same drugs used for assisted suicide are those used for lethal injections. And because a paralytic is involved, a person can look peaceful, while they actually drown to death in their own bodily secretions. Furthermore, experiments with assisted suicide led to immense trauma, with the drug cocktails “burning patients’ mouths and throats, causing some to scream in pain.” Prolonged, painful deaths from assisted suicide and euthanasia are also alarmingly common; a third of patients took 30 hours to die, while four percent took seven days to die, according to a study in the medical journal Anaesthesia.

“Advocates of assisted dying owe a duty to the public to be truthful about the details of killing and dying,” Dr. Joel Zivot, an associate professor of anesthesiology and surgery at the Emory School of Medicine, said in a 2022 interview. “People who want to die deserve to know that they may end up drowning, not just falling asleep.”

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