Losing Mummy

It has been a dizzying week for the children, Sophie, an actress, Edward, a chartered accountant who does most of the talking, and the youngest daughter Jessica, who prefers not to take part in the interview but tells me before she disappears that she doesn’t think the loss of her mother has hit her yet.

Since their return to Britain on Wednesday they have been deflected from the ravages of grief by proselytising, making the case for assisted suicide and answering criticism from those who feel that they helped their mother to do the wrong thing.

The hospice movement claims that with proper care a slow death can be a good one, but Edward’s response is vehement: “I find those comments annoying, they ignore the individual circumstances people find themselves in. If it is true for some people, then it is not for others. People say if we had good palliative care it would all be fine, if you have someone to turn you over every 15 minutes and up your morphine dose . . .

“But some people don’t want to lie in a darkened room on a featherbed unable to even blink. If they are high on morphine it may not be the life they want. I wasn’t for or against assisted dying but having seen it — and in a selfish way it meant I lost my mother — I would certainly want the choice.”

By assisting their mother’s travels to perform an act illegal in this country her children might have also acted illegally; although while Avon and Somerset police confer with the Crown Prosecution Service it is doubtful that action will be taken. If it were, Edward and Sophie would be willing to face the consequences.

“If there was ever a conflict between what is legally and morally right it is this situation. What we did is the final act of love and kindness any child can do for their parents,” says Edward.

“If it meant going to prison I would, absolutely,” adds Sophie, before her brother continues: “I have a lot to lose, a criminal caution could lose me my job, but if I were prosecuted it would be a price worth paying.”

Last Tuesday their 66-year-old mother, unable to face a future of untold debilitation, drank a lethal concoction of sodium pentobarbital in a flat owned by the Dignitas clinic in Zurich, which has helped 42 terminally ill Britons to die. Twenty-five minutes later, with her children holding her hands, she was dead.

SITTING close together on the sofa, conventionally dressed and beautifully spoken, the siblings are perfect ambassadors for the cause as Lord Joffe’s bill on assisted dying for the terminally ill passes though the Lords.

Articulate, educated and self- deprecating in a careful English way, they are refusing to apologise for their mother’s choice, one they themselves begged her to abandon before realising that nothing would change her mind.

Their strong-mindedness was inherited. Anne Turner was not quite what she seemed; on the face of it a middle-class lady of polished vowels and formidable flower arranging skills, a talented cook and gardener — nicknamed Boadicea by a friend of Sophie’s — she was also forthright in her views and progressive in her medicine. Having started her clinical career in hospital A&E, she moved into family planning, running Bath’s abortion clinic, undaunted by pro-life disapproval.

She was a member of the Voluntary Euthanasia Society (now Dignity in Dying) long before her own family would espouse its agenda. Her father had a stroke and took five weeks to die. Her mother died last September at 96; having broken her hip after a fall, she got pneumonia and was given morphine to ease the pain. Because of nervousness after the Shipman murders, however, gaps were left between her morphine injections so the agony returned.

“My mother thought that was terrible,” says Edward. “She was going to die anyway, why prolong her life?” Anne Turner had also nursed her husband Jack, a local GP, through multiple system atrophy, a condition cruelly and coincidentally similar to her own. The family watched their father sink from a fit hill-walker to a man who dribbled so badly that he wore a bib at the dinner table, gradually losing his faculties.

“We have seen two very different treatments of long-term illnesses,” says Edward. “Daddy was a doctor and knew that real life could be messy and thought we should confront it head on.”

In fact, there have been three neurological nightmares in one close family. In 2002, the same year that their father died, his brother died of motor neurone disease. But doesn’t their mother’s decision cast a gloomy inevitability for other PSP sufferers? “You always think maybe my mother will be the one where the symptoms won’t be so bad, she’ll be in this state for three or four years and we’ll have a good time together,” says Sophie.

“That could have happened . . . but having thought that about my father, then seen him die so slowly, slipping out of life in the most painful, distressing way, having seen the worst-case scenario which — let’s be honest — is the most likely outcome, I think she was right. I’d like to think I could do what she did.”

Anne Turner had no fear of death. This was not so much to do with her job but because at 18 she had been bitten on the leg by an adder, had been rushed to hospital and thought she was going to die: “She realised it was a peaceful experience, just like going to sleep.”

They are the sort of genteel and gentle upper middle-class family whose manners and good taste recall another time. Their lives had been privileged: classical concerts, private schools, growing up in the rambling vicarage.

In the garden stands the quince tree, the couple’s golden wedding present, which their father loved to see fruiting when he was too ill to garden. Of all the children, maybe Edward was closest to the mother who hosted a series of “coming out” dinners after he told her tearfully at 20 that he was gay: “She felt she had to come out as the mother of a gay man.”

After her husband’s death, Anne Turner planned to move into the bungalow down the road, which she loved for its walk-in showers and double-glazing, and restart her life, concentrating on what she loved: opera and botany, cut flowers, her children and bridge. She was diagnosed a month before that move; but already the symptoms had begun. The moods of a normally stable woman soared and dipped, for which she was prescribed anti-depressants.

She was also slurring her speech. “People thought she was drowning her sorrows after daddy died,” says Sophie. She walked with difficulty, could not bend down to lift things, kept falling over. “I think she had an inkling that something was seriously wrong. She didn’t want to know. She said, ‘I’m going to lose weight and then I’ll see what it is’.”

After a series of appointments with neurologists and two MRI scans, she telephoned her children and told them: “I have PSP and I am going to commit suicide.”

They did all they could to dissuade her from it. “It was horrible. We tried so hard to change her life so that she wouldn’t want to die.” Sophie, who is married, offered to move in with her; an advertisement was placed in The Lady magazine for a companion. Candidates were interviewed, details typed out but at the last minute she couldn’t bear the thought — too independent.

Edward instigated a complete overhaul of the garden, necessitating the constant presence of gardeners for whom she would have to make cups of tea. He flew his increasingly frail mother to Amsterdam, Barcelona, Milan, Budapest, where they saw opera: “I had to say the tickets were freebies and the flights on Air Miles, otherwise she’d have worried.”

“We tried anything,” says Sophie. Nothing worked: Edward recalls a scene in the kitchen where he begged her not to do it.

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“I cried my eyes out and threw my arms around her and said: mummy, please! I can’t bear the thought of losing you. That upset her, but she was determined, she said, ‘No, I’m going to do it’.”

At her family’s request she was examined on four occasions by psychiatrists who declared her absolutely rational. If the children wanted to stop her committing suicide they would have to have her sectioned, which both doctors and family thought cruel.

Every month their dread increased as they tried to second-guess her plans; they knew she would not tell them when, but there were clues, such as when she cancelled her bridge night. Her first attempt came last October: she took all her sleeping pills and anti-depressants, then put a plastic bag over her head, secured with rubber bands. Edward, who was staying, heard her bedside buzzer at 4am and discovered her groggy and the plastic bag by the bed.

“She needed to go to the loo and as I took her I remembered my father telling me that modern sleeping pills had built-in antidotes to make you sick before they kill you. If you put a plastic bag on your head and you’re not out cold you rip it off in your sleep. She had no recollection of it the next morning. When she woke she could hardly speak, but she said, ‘Pills, pills, give me the bag’.”

From that terrifying point the family’s attitude changed. “We all had lunch and decided that if she was going to do it, it couldn’t be like that,” says Sophie. “She would have to do it properly.”

Edward continues: “At first we’d thought, what makes us happy is our mother being there for us; but then it was, what makes us happy is her being happy, and what makes her happy is dying.

“How would we let her die, would it be in comfort? Or would we let her slit her wrists and bodge that, throw herself off a bridge? How do people in her position get control of their lives? If she had died a horrific death I’d never have forgiven myself. The kindest thing was to help her. She knew about Dignitas from the news.”

IT took three months for her application to be processed and the “green light” to be issued: documentation, including detailed medical reports, was dispatched for scrutiny; she wrote more than 100 letters to friends from whom her plan was kept secret, certain in the knowledge of an exhausting and pointless campaign to dissuade her. At first she had thought that she wanted to die on her 67th birthday on January 25, but then decided it would be too distressing for her children and made it the day before.

“The anticipation of the journey — of the loss — is worse than the loss itself,” says Sophie.

“When we got there,” adds Edward, “we became very attuned to helping her. She wasn’t unhappy so we weren’t going to be unhappy either. These were the last days we would spend with her.”

They flew to Zurich a week ago. How do you spend your last days with your beloved mother? To her delight they attended a concert to hear Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony and Rachmaninov’s impossibly emotional Second Piano Concerto, which saw then all crying.

The next day they went to the city’s botanical gardens where she spent an age checking the names of plants, took a boat trip, visited Sprüngli, home of Lindt chocolate, and went out for dinner. Somewhere wonderful, surely? They both laugh. Their mother hated anything grand so they went to the chain restaurant Mövenpick, but ordered champagne and said their tearful goodbyes, telling her that she was the most wonderful mother in the world.

“It was so difficult to get the words out, the more we cried the more she did.” But they also laughed — when their mother remarked that they had been lucky with the weather; when she panicked that she’d left the television on standby and was worried about the effects on the environment, saying she would phone the cleaner to get her to turn it off. And they laughed later when, close to death, she apologised for not having brought a case for her glasses, and Sophie said that she would wear them on the trip home.

“We were always teasing her about her lists. She was matter-of-fact about dying; she took the same pragmatic approach she would in booking a hair appointment. She said she was looking forward to it . . . it was a release. We had to be strong, in order for her to leave this life happily she had to know that we were okay.”

On Tuesday they had a 10am appointment with Dignitas at Forch, southeast of the city, where the clinic’s Dr Schweitzer confirmed that she had not been coerced in any way. Then they travelled to the clinic’s flat in an ordinary apartment block — “You could imagine an engineer or a widow living next door” — arriving at 11.50am.

A quiet, respectful volunteer who would assist the death, Mr Bernhard, greeted them. “We kept calling him Bernard and he didn’t answer. He was very kind.”

The functional space had a bedroom, bathroom, kitchen with a country-style table and four chairs; and an adjustable bed with an orange duvet; net curtains; three pictures on the wall. A little candle burnt in scented oil.

“I remember smelling that,” says Edward, “and thinking, I can’t believe she’s going to die in a room with Glade air freshener.” There was also a little bowl of chocolates, which would later play a vital role, a bottle of brandy, tea, coffee.

Anne Turner had put on her lipstick and the scent Edward gave her, dressed in plain trousers and a jumper, with her wedding and engagement ring and a necklace, a gift from her husband. An unsentimental woman, she brought no other personal trinkets with her. Half an hour before the lethal dose she was to be given an anti-emetic, and she was keen to get on with it.

At 12.20pm she drank the medicine which would stop her vomiting the poison and living, and the four were left alone.

SHE told us that we were wonderful children,” says Edward softly. “She said, ‘Sophie with all your cooking and organising, Jessica with your looking after the cats, Edward with your gardening’.

“You say your goodbyes earlier than you think and by that time we had said what we wanted. We started to sing London’s Burning and Frère Jacques, Tallis’s canon, Le Clocher du Vieux Manoir.”

When the half hour had passed, Mr Bernhard spoke to her alone, a last chance to back out, and from the next room they heard her sobbing that she wanted to die, the only time they witnessed any distress. He later told them that it was because she was worried about the impact this might have on them, which makes them both cry today.

They had to video the drinking of the poison for the authorities; she called it “the magic potion” and worried about it being bitter. Mr Bernhard held the small glass containing 50ml of clear fluid and said calmly, “Mrs Turner, if you drink this you will die.”

Sitting at the kitchen table, she responded, “Yes, yes”, and drank it back, in Edward’s words, “as if she was drinking schnapps”. She looked a little surprised by the vile taste but, seeing that she had left a little, she tilted back her head and finished the last drop.

Determined to master the retching, she ate a piece of chocolate and then another. After a couple of minutes she was complaining of feeling “woozy”. They helped her onto the bed, groaning and trying to speak. “But it was so quick,” says Edward, “like the sleeping potion in Romeo and Juliet.”

She was not allowed to lie flat until all the poison had reached her stomach; as her eyes started to close, they propped a cushion behind her and lowered the bed; soon she was in a deep sleep, snorting and choking.

“We didn’t put the duvet on because it would have been too hot,” recalls Edward. “She was lying with eyes closed and mouth open, and the snorting became normal breathing. We were all holding her hands. We said our goodbyes.”

Sophie interjects: “Then she went purple, which I didn’t know about . . . Then the skin goes yellow and waxy . . . She took the poison at 1.05 and at 1.35 she was dead.”

Afterwards they waited in small room for the police, a chief prosecutor, a doctor and assistants; the doctor’s assistant turned up with chewing gum and carrying a box of latex gloves. They answered civil questions and were a little shocked to hear laughter from the room where the body lay. Edward removed his mother’s jewellery for the medical examination: “I thought it was the last rite I could perform for her.”

Sophie felt more queasy, unsettled by the sense that her mother had left the waxy-looking corpse and upset to see her prosthetic breast, a reminder of the cancer she had beaten years ago. “I had a tempestuous relationship with her,” she says, “but I did love her very much. Just before she died she was cradling all of us and she said, ‘Look after each other’.”

She also told them she wanted them to see Strauss’s Die Fledermaus that evening. “I said yes,” says Edward, “thinking it would be the last thing we’d want to do, but afterwards I thought yes, and we went. It was performed by the Hungarian State Opera and mummy and I had seen them in Budapest. We sat there with tears rolling down our cheeks, just as we had at the Rachmaninov. If she wasn’t with me then, at least I knew it ’s what she wanted us to do.”

RELATIVES of Dignitas suicides are not invited to the cremation; Anne Turner’s ashes will be flown home in two weeks with the paperwork to be forwarded to the coroner.

The children have nothing but gratitude for the careful procedures of the clinic that helped them. And they have nothing but criticism for a law which meant that she had to die sooner than they wanted in order to be sure that she was well enough to travel to a place where assisted suicide is legal.

“She went much too soon for my liking,” says Edward. “She might have stayed for my civil partnership ceremony in a few months and my 40th birthday.

“People commented that she didn’t seem ill enough to go, but everyone trivialises someone else’s illness because they are trying to jolly them along. It’s true that my father lived a long time with much worse illness and I had a fantastic time with him.

“People really need to grasp the issue and not be so frightened of death. We are so squeamish. I think that underlies a lot of the criticism of what she and we did. I’m not so in touch with my mortality, but having seen mummy die, it was a swift and easy way to go. It has made me less fearful of death.”

Hearing Anne Turner’s shocking, ordinary story as told by her children leaves you feeling that they did their best, that siblings are a blessing in life, that given a similar prognosis of unremitting decline and a legal, compassionate exit strategy, millions would take the same path.

There are heroes who hang on bravely, stoically, believing in eternal life or stem cell breakthroughs (Christopher Reeve was one), and there are rationalists, who prefer to measure the loss of pleasure, of new seasons, children’s faces, jokes and books, against the horror of a helplessness in which the self shrivels to nothing. The Turner children, first terrified, then courageous, are now frankly relieved that their mother didn’t get there.

“My parents had a rock-solid marriage and we are incredibly fortunate,” says Edward. “They were the very best parents in the world.”

At this he begins to weep; his big sister turns and rubs his arm, moving closer. There will be much more of that.