Thank you so much.
Pat Malone: My experience with my father was entirely different. My daughter, who was seven at the time, reminded me recently, when I was putting my thoughts together for this, that in his last weeks she had visited him, and I had taken her into a side room and told her not to expect to see the grandpa that she knew, because he was very, very ill and he did not look anything like she would expect. She said she was very thankful that I did that, because she was stunned and shocked when she saw him. He was like a 1,000-year-old corpse, he was moving, and his eyes were yellow, and that is how she remembers him—she does not remember any of the good times. My sister, who lived close by, was with him most of the time, and she just sat by his bed and prayed for his heart to stop.
We were all shell-shocked when he did finally die. As I say, that informed the decisions that were made about suicide by my sister and brother. Had he been a farm animal, we would have been prosecuted for causing unnecessary suffering, but he was a man so he was not entitled to that sort of consideration. I remember him in that horrible ward breathing his last. The only time he moved in the last days was to cough up blood. For a man who had asked to be relieved of that burden, who had asked for an act of mercy, a week before, and it had been denied him—I cannot understand how anybody would deny a dying man a deliverance.
When my brother died, he and my sister-in-law had been together since they were 11 years old. He was only 53, so they had already known each other for 40 years. She had shared his suffering while he was being driven around the country looking for diagnoses and, ultimately, looking for doctors who would help him commit suicide. His weight had gone from 18 stone to 8 stone, and he was bright yellow as well. He was suffering all the time and she was suffering with him. She was relieved as well as grieving when he actually died—and then the police were at the door. The investigation went on until his inquest eight months later. The police were as helpful and sensitive as they could possibly be. Vicky got the impression that they wanted her to give the wrong answer—when they said, “Did you know what he was going to do?” she said, “Yes, I did”; to “Could you have stopped him?” she said, “Yes, he was weak as a kitten”; and to “Could you have resuscitated him?” she said “Yes,” because she had had some nursing training, and so on—and with every answer they just collapsed a little bit more.
Ultimately, at the inquest there was an anomaly in his suicide note. It was written in two different colours of ink, and the police investigated whether it could have been written at different times, possibly by different people. Giving evidence at his inquest, the police said that they thought his pen had run out—there was a squiggle at the top where it changed from black to blue—and they said that they were not proceeding with any idea that there had been positive involvement in his suicide.
I have a note of the transcript of what the coroner said, which reads: “I don’t want to make any more of this than I absolutely have to. I simply record therefore that Michael Malone took his own life. He did so quite deliberately and having made appropriate preparations, and so it’s not a case of my saying that he did so while the balance of his mind was disturbed, because it clearly was not. It was a decision that he took and I have every sympathy with that decision in so far as a coroner is allowed to say that.”
The police were very sympathetic. The coroner was very sympathetic. Danny Kruger is very sympathetic. But sympathy only goes so far, and I am glad that this Committee is now looking at exactly the people who matter first in this issue, who cannot be here to talk for themselves.
Liz Reed: In answer to the first point, about anything we would change or do differently, I think actually my brother’s case was dealt with really well and there were checks and balances along the whole way: “Does he meet the eligibility criteria?”—obviously—“but also, does he want to?” His wife was involved in the process with him, and he was checked constantly. A doctor administered for him, and he had met him already. He knew him and had a rapport with him. He had a few jokes with him at the end. So from that perspective, I do not think so. It is slightly different in Australia, in that it does not have to have a High Court judge, so the process feels a bit more streamlined than it is here, and maybe the access would be slightly different because of that.
In terms of the grief, I think anyone that knows someone who has been through a terminal illness knows that there is a level of anticipatory grief that comes with that—the waking up every morning thinking, “Has it been tonight? What happens next? What’s today?” Because when someone is in the final stages of their life, which my brother was, there is always something every day: “Oh, he’s got to have fluid drained from his heart today,” or, “Oh, this has happened.” There is always something, so that grief starts coming on before the person has even died.
The day my brother died we sat outside in the courtyard and had a glass of champagne. He chose a Bob Dylan song that he wanted to die to. It was extremely peaceful. It was seconds. And he got to say all the things, have all the conversations, speak to our parents—that sort of real American “closure”. That is what he got, and we were not sitting around thinking, “I wish I’d said this. I missed it,” or, “I was off doing something with the kids.” We were all there: my mum, my dad, me, his wife. We sat there and held his hand—and what a gift.