(With thanks to John Milton’s Paradise Lost) 

My father dies. Then many years later, my mother.  

The impression of that first death is fashioned by the soft sounds of someone sobbing, and the warmth of a hand held in mine. The other memory remains obscene. A suspension in hell. It is pain, torn up by the roots.  

Exhibit A: My father, John. (1993)  

Who dies after a brief relationship with lung cancer. The doctor suggests a three-month window before he will breathe his last.  

“Take him home. Take care of him.” 

A month into that white skylight of time, my father indicates with a crook of his calloused finger, that I need to come closer. To listen. And I know what he will ask. I’d seen “bad deaths” during a long-ago career as a nurse, and he is not a stupid man. I want a good death for him. He wants a good death for himself. We both imagine what poorly controlled pain must feel like. The agony of suffocation. So, despite the illegality of euthanasia (voluntary assisted dying legislation is still decades away), I nod without hesitation.  

Fortunately, my father doesn’t require me to help him die. The cancer slows his heart, and he passes away quietly in his own bed, with his family gathered around him. It is the best death I’ve ever witnessed and that gives me gladness—for a man who’d led a loveless life. 

Exhibit B: My mother, Diana. (2017) 

She dies 24 years after my father, from the effects of early onset Alzheimer's. Slack flesh hanging off her bones, pallid face contorting, a stench of decaying chrysanthemums that I cannot remove from my clothes—even when I leave the nursing home for a brief sleep and end up shoving everything I’m wearing into the washing machine.  

Occasionally, my mother, who is spread flat, makes an animal grunt, the grasping length of ugly noise embracing and expressing her distress, and her despair. My mother has not had anything to drink, or swallowed food, for 12 days. The two assistant nurses—who every two hours swoop into her room with wings folded, forced smiles plastered on flushed faces, together a shifting force of manufactured breeziness—confide that the staff are holding a sweep on who’ll last the longest, my mother, or old Mary Mabel down the hallway. 

Towards the end, drowning in a froth of oblivion, my mother no longer recognises family, cannot communicate, does not even seem to remember that she is human.  

My adult son has spent his professional life in service to the community, undertaking work that requires physical strength, and a measured response during emergency situations. For a number of years, during his childhood, my mother and I brought him up between us. She was rigid with mealtimes. Organised and enthusiastic about enrolling him in team sports like soccer and cricket. I will always remember the two of them, sat up in her bed, warm in a circle of light, as she read to him from Harry Potter.  

In contrast, I was the weird single mother who worked and didn’t mix well with the other mothers. I was the one who took my son to drum lessons. And on long bicycle rides to the beach. Watched movies with him, that probably explored subject matter not necessarily appropriate for a five-year-old. Sometimes, I believe, that he was excluded from playing with the children in his class, because of me.  

But we share an exceptional relationship. When I ask him about his grandmother’s final years he describes the time as confronting. “The vibrant, warm, funny woman I remembered had disappeared, and what was left was a body going through motions of a long painful death…” 

Before she entered the nursing home, I asked my mother if she wanted to discuss euthanasia. She knew, by then, about the request my father had made of me. She knew the result of Alzheimer's. Sitting in her elegant living room, on a polished teak chair, surrounded by huge landscapes hanging on the walls—fiery coloured oils painted in orange and red, framed in heavy, ornate gold—she shook her head. Amongst the fine 1970s Parker furniture, shuffling her slippers to nowhere, my mother rejected any notion of killing herself. 

My son’s concern about what came later, was whether his grandmother had any sense of self, or dignity? Did she, at some time, during the endless wash of days and nights experience five seconds of recall, and think, and wake, to the final misery, the horror of her fate?  

One of my many concerns about what came later, was that the law, and hence the staff, deliberately decided to allow my mother to suffer. The seven-year sentence of shame, sorrow and confusion that she’d already been subjected to, was amplified. The axles on the rack to which we’d shackled her, were screwed tighter. Over 14 arduous days, medical professionals refused to give her “too much” morphine, because it might “hasten her death.” 

In my opinion, that’s immoral. But what’s deemed unlawful, is assisting those who are not terminally ill, with a medically assisted suicide. That includes patients with dementia, or those who are simply tired of life, waiting and facing a hopeless and dreary future.  

Hearts are tricky things. Aged 64, I suffer from an arrhythmia which won’t directly kill me but might cause a stroke. According to the Stroke Foundation, one in four cerebrovascular accidents in Australia, are caused by my arrhythmia (atrial fibrillation). There is also a strong association between atrial fibrillation and developing dementia, independent of a stroke. 

My heart condition already limits my quality of life. Walking distances is beyond me, and travelling, an activity that once defined me, is now denied to me. Naturally, I wonder about what kind of death I will experience. Especially, if I don’t act in a timely manner. Can I risk taking potluck, keep my fingers crossed, and hope that I will die quickly? That the pain will be swift? Or will my death mimic my mother’s? After watching both parents die in cinematic close ups, my husband perish on the concrete floor of a Lisbon hotel, and after working in palliative care, I’ve decided not to risk it. And I’m not alone in seeking autonomy over how and when I die.  

My friend Margaret and I regularly meet at a café on busy Maitland Road. At 77 years of age, with her lively expression, slender, paint-stained fingertips cupped around a mug of steaming English Breakfast tea, stylishly dressed as always, in clothes she stitches herself, Margaret has recently been diagnosed with an aggressive breast cancer. She has a PhD, works as a commercial artist, and has taught at universities around the world. They removed the cancer, and for now she is free of the disease. But she chooses not to continue with the tablets that are meant to keep the cancer at bay.  

We discuss our writing. Margaret might mention an exhibition in which she’s showing. We argue politics and recommend books to one another. And sitting amongst the chatter of young mothers soothing babies, wrangling the chaos of toddlers, we lower our voices and return to the question of what we’re going to do when our independence diminishes, when life no longer holds meaning. Rather than experiencing year after year of functional decline, eking out a silent half-life reliant on strangers for things most intimate, why can’t we control the manner and time of our own death?  

Margaret describes old age as demeaning. And I, 13 years her junior, have also begun to hear the insidious inflection of condescension in the voices of others. My friend resents how no acknowledgement is ever made for what one has achieved and experienced during their working life. She complains that some people treat her as if she is a child, with no knowledge or understanding of what is beneficial for her own well-being.  

She still lives alone and makes art every day.  

I tell Margaret about the essay I am writing, and ask her, whether at some future date, she will enter a nursing home. She tells me, her eyes darkening with anxiety, that she has considerable experience in observing aged care homes. That being placed in an institution is her greatest fear.  

Self-determined death, or medical assisted suicide is a separate and more controversial subject to that of Voluntary Assisted Dying (VAD). In Australia, in 2025, VAD is operating in all states—Victoria, Western Australia, Tasmania, South Australia, Queensland, and New South Wales. A medical practitioner is allowed to administer the medication, or the patient can administer it themselves. VAD will commence in the Australian Capital Territory on November 3. In the Northern Territory, it remains a crime. 

The eligibility criteria are stringent. The patient must have at least one disease, illness or medical condition that is advanced, progressive and will cause death. That condition, will, on the balance of probabilities, cause death within six months (or within 12 months if the person has a neurodegenerative disease, illness or medical condition). The illness must be causing suffering that cannot be relieved in a way the person considers tolerable. 

By comparison, in Switzerland—the opportunity to end your own life due to disabling old age, even when not suffering from a terminal illness, is legal. And in the neighbouring Netherlands, where the introduction of legislation surrounding assisted suicide for the elderly is widely debated, and bills regularly submitted to the Central Government in support of such laws, a term of significance was coined many years ago: voltooid leven. Translated, it means, a life completed.  

David Goodall set a precedent in Australia, when aged 104, and of the opinion that his life was completed, he travelled to Switzerland for voluntary euthanasia. Goodall wanted to “take charge of his fate.” He was a science professor, and Order of Australia recipient, who stated that it was his life, and his choice to make. What was important was “to be free to choose…death, [at] an appropriate time.” 

Without that choice, and when I allow myself to think about it too much, what I fear most is a strident, foul-smelling, fluorescent endlessness. Living for too long, surviving in a solitary wasteland, every kindred spirit you’ve loved, disappeared. I can count on my hand the number of people who visited my mother over the seven years she was confined to the dementia ward. No-one wanted to witness her misery. No one wants to confront their own terror of languishing for years in a nursing home without hope of end, every day confronted by hurt, by the disturbing effects of a disintegrating body, deprived of work, deprived of home, deprived of privacy, deprived of autonomy and meaning. Eventually, deprived of self. Can we call that life?  

As part of the much-despised baby boomer generation, I’m an individual who abandoned my marriages when they didn’t work, took full advantage of my free education, and travelled the world, curious about myself and keen to challenge the status quo. That independence held so dear, the self-sufficiency I struggled to gain, that core part of myself, my identity, valued above almost anything else? I’m unlikely to want to sacrifice it for torturing years propped up by infernal docility, being fed blended broccoli off a spoon, my mouth wiped with a bib by a 17 year old girl called Amelia, who thinks I look and smell disgusting, who is more interested in chatting with the other assistant, let's call her Emma, who’s screaming across the dining room about the boy she met at the club on Saturday night. I refuse to be made to pay penance, to a religion I don’t believe in, for a sin I didn’t commit, that sentences me to an arbitrary punishment in a living hell. Suffering is not mine to value. 

Instead, I contemplate a life completed with dignity. With the self-remained whole. Where days, upon days of degradation, and inhumanity, are no longer a reality to fear. Lost in wandering mazes is a future no individual should be expected to tolerate. Why should a life end with pain tearing each of us out by the roots?