How I Tried and Failed to Assist My Mother's Suicide

‘If your time ain't come, not even a doctor can kill you' — so goes the proverb that best echoes the dilemma of an aging humankind as we glimpse the harrowing vista of decrepitude to come: a panorama that first takes in the custard-stained wingback chairs of a soul-extinguishing care home, then yaws off nauseatingly to a vision of the demented and the drooling as they hobble into that good night. How can you swerve incarceration and indignity when you just won't die — and, more pertinently, when no one is allowed to kill you? How to be the auteur of your own death when ‘self-euthanasia' proves so tricky you need the help of a loved one, thus implicating them in a criminal act?