Dear [redacted]
I am writing to thank you and your team for the care you have given me during a few days’ stay on the oncology ward.
I have felt deeply held these last few days, thanks to the good care of many people. I’m thinking of nurses Ajal, Minu, Miliana, Ellie, Michael, Maggie, Danni, Abbi (welcome back again from maternity leave!), Vania, Issy, and a fair few others whose names I didn’t catch, all of whom were professionally efficient and still always warm and understanding, too. I’m thinking also of Ed who’s been helping me to get my strength back, and the support staff, like Anya who made my bed for me and Peter who brought me my breakfast and favourite biscuits, and all the people behind the scenes like yourself who help it all to work. You are all deeply inspiring to me, especially in a world where care of any kind is getting pushed to the edge and so becoming much more precious.
Last night was hard on the nurses and doctors, as they tried in vain to save the life of the gentle man across the room from me. I watched the effort play out like a shadow play across my curtains. I’d never witnessed anything like that before. I couldn’t sleep for a while afterwards so I wrote to my MP in the early hours of the morning to encourage her to vote in favour of the Assisted Dying Bill. I have copied that email below and I hope that this, too, may serve as a kind of oblique thank you for your devoted work.
Please pass my appreciation to your team.
Again, in gratitude,
David Gee
Dear Manuela Perteghella MP
Belated, heartfelt congratulations to you on your election to Member of Parliament. No one saw that coming.
I write to you as a constituent of yours, in favour of the Assisted Dying Bill with an encouragement to you to support it when the opportunity comes.
As a cancer patient expected to live less than six months, I am one of the people the Bill would honour with the choice to end my own life in my own way, while respecting the dignity of the nurses and doctors who have been caring for me so fulsomely. I am writing this from the oncology ward at the Churchill Hospital in Oxford, said by some to be the finest in the country. It certainly feels like it might be, given the attentiveness of the care and the professionalism of the system here. In the light of my experience, I salute the profession of care as among our deepest.
I happen to be writing to you in the middle of the night. The man in the bed opposite me has just died. I watched as if from the inside of Socrates’ cave as the shadows of the nurses and doctors moved across my dividing curtain for twenty minutes while a plummy voice from a defibrillator on the other side of the room gave instructions. ‘Start CPR! Match the tone! Stop CPR! Don’t touch the patient! Analysing… no shock advised. Start CPR…’ At 3.50am, a doctor’s voice called it. They had been at it for twenty minutes or so: calm, persistent, abundant in care. I heard the staff thanked each other as their shadows filed out across my curtain, taking the bed with them. The last sound I heard was the wheels, drifting to nothing down the corridor.
I did not know the man well at all – not beyond a well-wishing hello from a fellow patient at the opening and close of each day that we have shared in this room. I have no idea what he made of the Bill you will soon be voting on. I think I do know that he would have wanted the right to take his own end into his own hands if that had been his preference, or to commend himself into the caring hands of others and let events take their course. One way may carry no more dignity than another. The dignity is in the choice, a sovereign choice if ever there be. It feels more dignified to me that he may make that choice himself than that the state should have already decided a ‘no’ on his imagined behalf.
The man’s kindly wife who sat with him during the afternoon – who would pass him his ‘sticks’ as they called them so he could go to the toilet while he passed her the paper – might be the kind of eminence grise plotter that the Bill’s detractors believe are out to pray on unwitting spouses. I am sure such people exist here and there. But could one deny the man his own choices over his own life just in case another person were lurking behind them? This is not how we live our lives, nor does the state expect that we should. So why lose faith in a person’s sovereignty when their life faces its end? In any case, the Bill seems to have anticipated such meddlers carefully. I for one feel protected by it.
My own end is expected in a few months. I would like to weigh the same choice to end my own life when the time comes – to be or not to be. And I want this for all my fellow patients sleeping here now. For them and for me, I encourage you to vote in favour of the Bill. Above all, I hope and trust that you will vote in good conscience.
It is now past five in the morning. The room is quiet again. They have left the light on in the empty bay but I shall try to get some sleep. I am glad that I spent this time talking to you and I wish you well.
Yours sincerely
David Gee
Manuela wrote back saying she was inclined to vote in favour of the Bill but was still listening to constituents on the different sides of the debate. She also asked to quote some of my letter in her speech in the House, should she be called by the Speaker, to which I agreed, of course. I don’t know if she did. In any case, I’m grateful to Manuela for voting for the Bill at second reading on 29 November 2024, helping it to pass to the next stages.
Hope's work 