Why I took my wife to die at Dignitas

Elaine had already had one spell of radiotherapy, aimed at limiting the disease and mitigating the pain. The reverse occurred. The pain flared. Then, in late July, she received scan results revealing that chemotherapy had failed to stop the cancer, now highly aggressive, from spreading to her liver and adrenal glands.

The results coincided with the arrival of a letter from Dignitas confirming that Elaine was eligible for assisted suicide. She decided to go ahead. Half a dozen of the family’s closest friends were let in on the secret, visiting Elaine in the garden she had planned at the back of the house.

“She was remarkable. Unbelievably brave,” says David. “I don’t think I’d have the courage to do what she did.”

But there were problems. Elaine was so weak that the 12-hour ambulance journey to Zurich would have been too much. So David (who says that “some people are forced to go early to Dignitas because they are scared they’ll be too ill to make the journey if they leave it later”) found a Swiss air-ambulance.

“They were highly professional. I suspect they knew exactly what was going on, but they didn’t probe and I didn’t say.”