'Mum, I would kill you if I had the strength - if only the law was different'

12 December 2023 , 18:17

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Diana Rigg, who died of lung cancer in 2020, appeared to ask her daughter to end her life (Image: AFP via Getty Images)

Ever since I was a little girl, my mum has told me that one day I’ll have to hold a pillow over her face. There’s never been any doubt that she’s serious. If she gets to a point where she can no longer look after herself, or is in pain, she doesn’t want to live – because, to her, that is no life.

When I was 15 we took our ancient, beloved cat Coco to the vet and – after the miracle cure I’d been hoping for didn’t materialise – decided that the kindest thing we could do was to end his misery.

My mum used it as another teaching moment: see, this is what we should be able to do for those we love, anything else is inhumane.

I’d always thought it was just in my house where this kind of childhood pillow talk took place, but Diana Rigg’s daughter Rachael Stirling just revealed they had pretty much the exact same conversation.

Diana, who died from lung cancer in 2020, had been on end-of-life drugs for four days when she said: “Rachie, it’s gone on too long – push me over the edge.”

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Rachael remembers: “I felt sick. I knew what she was asking me to do. I had made a promise when I was quite young, that I would one day put a pillow over my mother’s face if she ever asked me to. It was a joke for years. Until now. And I couldn’t do it. It was the one and only time she showed anger or bad temper in any of her suffering.”

Rachael has this week released, at her mother’s request, tapes of the actress passionately advocating for an assisted dying law.

In the recording, Diana says: “They don’t talk about how awful, how truly awful the details of this condition are, and the ignominy that is attached to it. Well, it’s high time they did. And it is high time there was some movement in the law to give choice to people in my position.

“This means giving human beings true agency over their own bodies at the end of life. This means giving human beings political autonomy over their own death.”

This posthumous proclamation hopefully adds weight to the ongoing assisted dying debate, on which MPs are expected to publish recommendations to the Government within weeks.

One who will clearly be supporting it is Labour’s Paul Blomfield, whose father was among the estimated 650 terminally ill people who take their own lives every year.

“He took that decision after he sat down with a Macmillan nurse and had been through what his last months might look like,” Paul has explained.

Assisted-dying laws are progressing in Scotland, the Isle of Man and Jersey, and legislation that allows the choice for terminally ill, mentally competent adults is already in place in Australia, New Zealand and 10 US states. Broader laws are also in place in Spain, Austria, Switzerland, Netherlands, Luxembourg Belgium, Canada and Colombia.

It’s a criminal offence to encourage or assist another’s suicide. So as things currently stand, my choice will be either to watch my mum enduring a reality I’m certain she doesn’t want, or to risk prison by helping her escape that, if I’d even be able to, which, like Rachael Stirling, I probably wouldn’t.

So my only option, really, is to let my mum down, it will just be a question of how. There has to be a better way.