In 2001 my mother visited us in Cambridge and, walking to church one Sunday, fell and broke her hip.
From then on she died slowly and painfully over the next four-and-a-half years. The pain was not physical so much as psychological as she gradually lost all her freedom.
As I watched her die, I prayed that I would not live into a similarly long and (through no fault of her own) useless old age, a burden to my wife and family, and an embarrassment to my friends, ‘Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything’. I once said to the churchwardens at St. Andrew the Great that I did not want to live to be a problem to those who cared for me: bad-tempered, irritable, snapping orders at my wife Fiona, while she pushed me around in a wheelchair. One of the wardens replied that the only change would be the wheelchair!
