On Friday, 29 November, the House of Commons will hear the Second Reading of The Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill 2024-25. This is a Private Members Bill, introduced by Kim Leadbeater MP.
This is a bill (a draft law) that would legalise medically assisted dying (assisted suicide) in the UK, for terminally ill adults. The long title of the Bill states that it would “allow adults who are terminally ill, subject to safeguards and protections, to request and be provided with assistance to end their own life”.
The vote on the Second Reading is the key vote that will determine if this controversial measure becomes law. MPs have a free vote, meaning they themselves decide how to vote, not the Government or their party. If a majority of MPs vote for the Second Reading of this Bill, it will be introduced into UK law.
Growing Old Grace-fully believes in the value of all human life, including of course later life and old age (something too often not the case in society) and those living with terminal illnesses and the various forms of dementia. As with many older people’s organisations, we want to see better and more personal health care, including palliative care, for all, and through this to give each person dignity in the latter stages of life and in dying.
Allowing assisted dying/assisted suicide, even for one group, means medical professionals will have to be involved with assisting people to take their own lives, as opposed to treating and caring for them and alleviating physical and mental pain through medical relief and psychological support.
The example in other countries also shows that once such an initial law is introduced for one group of people, there is pressure to extend it to others, which could include old people, who may be made to feel a burden on their family and on society, and people living with dementia and other degenerative conditions.
The Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales (CBCEW) is calling on people to write to the MP and their website has a raft of resources to help inform people about the Bill and the issue. Their resources are available here.
There is also a page on the website of the Diocese of Leeds with information here.
The third of Growing Old Grace-fully‘s 2024 online sessions is Learning From Each Other: Sharing Experience from Parishes on Thursday 18th July, 7:00-8:00pm.
This session is about hearing examples of great work already happening, with contributions from:
* Maureen Connolly from Immaculate Heart Parish, Huddersfield * Breda Theakston from the Elizabeth Prout Centre, talking about Bereavement support * Andrew Winfield from St John Vianney Parish, Leeds
There will also be breakout groups to share other experiences and ideas as to how to enhance the spiritual life of older people in your own parish community and lives. The session will start and finish with prayer and reflection led by Rev. Joe Cortis, who is a Growing Old Grace-fully trustee.
The session will start at 7pm and at 8pm, a Zoom link will be circulated to all attendees and the waiting room will be open from 6:55pm.
To reserve your place, please book a free ticket on Eventbrite here.
Our first 2 events went very well, with nearly 60 people at the excellent Webinar with Lynn Bassett , and over 20 at the first Discussion session, which gave rise to rich sharing in our break out groups.
This series is aimed at providing opportunities to talk openly about the subject of death and dying, rather than avoiding it as a taboo topic. We feel this is even more important in the wake of the devastating effects of the Covid-19 global pandemic during recent months.
All are welcome at these online events; you may find them particularly helpful if you are supporting, visiting or caring for older people, the bereaved, or those nearing the end of life.
Format for the Events
We will kick off the series with a seminar type event with Dr Lynn Bassett being interviewed by Carol Burns, followed by opportunity to post questions in the chat function. This event can host a greater number of attendees.
The following 3 events will give more opportunity for discussion, and so may need to be limited to 30 people per event; if the events are oversubscribed we will keep a waiting list and consider planning further dates.
You can pick and choose which events to attend, there is no obligation to attend all 4 events as they are each stand-alone events in their own right.
This interesting article from the Guardian explores the subject of drawing up end-of-life wishes and how the virus may be changing our attitude to death.
Peter Hallgarten, who survived a serious case of coronavirus. He and his wife decided 10 years ago to put together their end-of-life wishes (living wills), including a DNR (do not resuscitate order).
The article sates: ‘…Suddenly, death is all around … Everyone knows someone who has been touched. As a result, people are not only having intimations of their own mortality; more of them are thinking about how they want to die; of what they want to avoid in the way of intervention and what they would hope for, too, given the choice. Interest in advance directives, the documents often referred to as living wills, has grown dramatically during the pandemic….’
For more information on end-of-life wishes and related issues, see the websites below:
Find out about ReSPECT, a process which creates a personalised recommendation for your clinical care in emergency situationsA Catholic website with many useful articles about the end of life.
A new support and advice service is being launched to help people across West Yorkshire and Harrogate through grief and loss.
‘Practical and emotional support and advice is available from 8am to 8pm, 7 days a week via our freephone number 0808 1963833, or online chat facility. Our team can offer support and help connect you with organisations local to you, who can offer additional help where needed’.
The free service, commissioned by West Yorkshire and Harrogate Health and Care Partnership, will be delivered by West Yorkshire and Harrogate Independent Hospices Consortium, Bradford Counselling Collaborative and Leeds Mind.
Do contact the service if you:
are suffering any form of grief and loss
are worried about losing someone, whether this relates to a family member, friend or member of their community
have been unable to see a loved one in their illness or final days
are feeling impacted by the volume of deaths across the country or other aspects of the virus
As we are not able to run the conference at this time, we thought we would remind you of some useful websites and books on the topics of living and dying well. We hope you benefit greatly from exploring this content.
This excellent website based on an ancient Catholic tradition called Ars Moriendi offers practical and spiritual support to anyone faced with the prospect of death and dying, including helpful articles and videos.
Revd. Tom Lusty, LCI member and Vicar at St Giles, Bramhope reflects on ministry spent as a full-time hospice chaplain in the context of Covid-19.
Given the five years I spent inhabiting a hospice on a more or less daily basis I now know that death isn’t all that bad. It can sometimes be protracted and exhausting for all concerned. But even in such circumstances a good death is possible. With a good death there is a tangible sense of completeness, of dying with integrity.
To be honest I did not spend a great deal of time talking about death at the hospice beyond using euphemisms for it. For some of the nurses heaven was their euphemism of choice for death: “Gladys has gone to heaven now – God help them all up there”. I did speak, however, about my Christian faith when invited to do so, and the opportunities that came my way to speak about resurrection hope were considerable.
Within our tiny specialist world hospice chaplains have developed a repertoire of material that enables people to prepare spiritually for their own dying. Three resources that were and remain helpful to me are Mud and Stars, which gave me the theology, Tom Gordon’s A Need for Living which gave me the metaphors, and John O’Donohue’s Benedictus which gave me everything else: when there is nothing else you can do, you can always bless. That is a powerful thing to be left with – if you can bless sublimely, even better.
Dying is not about so much anguish and forsakenness. A good death is a movement towards integration – from “dislocation to relocation, from disorientation to re-orientation, from disintegration to re-integration” as Mud and Stars puts it. Part of a wider crucifixion/resurrection dynamic where we are always on the lookout for resurrection.
The cover photo of a book by Tom Gordon entitled New Journeys Now Begin depicts the access path to north beach on the Island of Iona. The inscription reads “No bikes beyond this point”. For each of us there will come a point where we have to relinquish the bike to go on the next stage of the journey. Getting off the bike can be painful because we get used to cycling everywhere. The more in life we can put the bike down and enjoy the view, the better prepared we will be for that moment in life when we will each have to “say goodbye to the bike”. As it were. This is a metaphor. A metaphor for resurrection.
As well as using metaphors a lot a group of hospice chaplains adopted a mnemonic as a helpful way into conversations about dying. The HEALER model goes like this:
H is for Hope – what takes people in a trajectory away from despair.
E is for Exploring Feelings – encouraging people to articulate their feelings.
A is for Adjustment to Loss – exploring how significant loss is transcended.
L is Looking Back – doing a life review: anything significant left unresolved?
The E and the R stand for Existential and Religious issues – some people are terrified of death for reasons that go beyond fear of the physical process of dying. I put that under ‘Existential’. Religion comes last of all. That is healthy because it says not all our needs are religious ones. We may choose to express our grounds for hope in religious terms but never exclusively so.
The HEALER mnemonic provides us with six different prompts as a helpful way into a conversation about dying. These prompts are not to be tackled exhaustively in chronological order (imagine how awful that would be) but rather as a means of focussing on some of the ways in which the conversation might go.
Given that Easter this year coincides with the beginning of the six to eight week peak of the Covid-19 pandemic in the UK using prompts from this mnemonic might be helpful during that time if we wanted to reflect on our own mortality. Devoting a little space to reflect on our own dying (say ten minutes, once a week) will certainly make us more open to engage with others who may be starting out on the process of the end of life’s journey.
When someone asks “what hymns are you having for your funeral?” a closed response “goodness, I have never thought of that” may not always be adequate. A more open-ended, personal response to the question might well allow the questioner to fulfil a need to talk openly about death.
In any Christian model of spiritual preparation for dying you can’t leave out the letting go …and the leaping. John O’Donohue describesthe daily handing over of one’s life as the act of awakening and surrender. The possibility of this daily practising of such a hand over, however we may choose to do it, of our lives into the life of God may well be what makes us most Christ-like.
Each morning we awaken to the light… each night we surrender to the dark… Awakening and surrender: they frame each day and each life; between them the journey where anything can happen.
John O’Donoghue, Anam Cara
The HEAL(ER) mnemonic was devised by Revd Linda Elliott, at one time Chaplain at Thorpe Hall Hospice in Peterborough.
Books mentioned in this article:
Mud and Stars: The Report of a Working Party on the Impact of Hospice Experience on the Church’s Ministry of Healing
PLEASE NOTE THATTHIS CONFERENCE HAS BEEN POSTPONED. WE HOPE TO REARRANGE IT FOR THE AUTUMN. A day to talk more openly about dying, death and bereavement.
10.00am Arrival, opportunity to browse marketplace of informative stalls 11.00am ‘Can we talk about death?’ – facilitated discussion groups for all 12.00pmKeynote speaker Dr Lynn Bassett
‘Making those difficult conversations just a little easier’
1.00pm Lunch
2.00pm Workshops – first round.
You will be able to choose one from the following:
Palliative Care – Medical Mythbusting
Putting Affairs in Order – Financial and Legal
Funerals and Memorialising
Supporting Carers
Having the conversation – visiting and pastoral care
3.00pmWorkshops -second round (opportunity to attend another of the topics from the above list)
It’s been said that death is the last taboo and certainly in our heavily medicalised approach to dying we seem to have lost some of our skills for dealing with the end if life.
How many people have seen a dead body, how many people have been with someone who is in the last few days of life?
It may be that it’s only when someone very close to us approaches death that we have those experiences, often for the very first time.
I would hope that when I am in the last few months of life I have the support of a palliative doctor (or “deathwife”),such as Kathryn Mannix. She spent her days with the terminally ill and their families, witnessing and supporting them at times of intense suffering, terror and loss. About a quarter of deaths are sudden and unexpected, but she saw the ones that come slowly, over months or years, and while much of her work was diagnostic and medical, one of her crucial tasks was to help those who are dying and their families find ways of dealing with life’s final, great event.
Mannix has recently retired and her book from 2018, With the End in Mind: Dying, Death and Wisdom in an Age of Denial is a treasure trove of stories about the end of life for a great variety of people, men and woman young and old. Mannix tells their stories with compassion and love. She talks about the different strategies she uses to help people make the right choices for them in their as they approach death and in doing so points us in the direction of the decisions we may need to make.
She never judges and is clear that people make many different choices, but she wants people to have the support to make choices so that there death be as good as they wish it to be.
The book is compulsive, I couldn’t put it down, I cried and I laughed with the people she worked with. I recommend it to anyone of any age and by recommending it to other family members it’s a good way to start those very difficult discussions about your last wishes.
If you would like to discuss how Growing Old Grace-fully might help support older people in your parish then please visit our contact page here and get in touch.
